Xenophon Vos

The spiders follow me everywhere I go. I’ve heard they memorize my routine. The internet tells me if I see a spider, I’m doing something wrong. But the spiders follow me everywhere I go.

I wake up in the morning, every morning, at 6am. An alarm blares from the desk on the other side of my room. I wake up, get up, turn off the alarm. A spider watches me do this all from the ceiling.

It started much less often a few years ago. A spider would watch me wake up, occasionally, but that would be it for the day. I almost thought it was just the time mildly changing with the earth.

When I leave my room, another spider’s many eyes are on me. I can feel them boring a hole inside me. It is almost a bother. They watch me through every movement. I go first to the coffeemaker, and then to the fridge, and then to the table with a mug and my phone. I try hard to ignore the gathering of arachnids above me.

A psychic once told me they are an omen. She did not know, I think, that they sat above her as she said so. And how possibly could one interpret an omen around everything they’ve ever known.

Over the years they’ve gotten more and more present. A year ago today, there were just a few spiders at work and a couple at home. A month later, there was one in every room.

So I stand, and I gather my things, and I carry my bag out to the car where a smaller pest sits on the glass above the speedometer. They are pests, really. No matter how many I kill there’s always one there. I can feel it more often than I see it. Just to prove a point I grab a napkin and wipe this one off the glass, stuffing it in a bag of fast food trash in the back.

When I get to work, they are there as well. I have complained about the infestation to my supervisor but the pest services he hires are never able to find anything. They don’t leave webs, they just sit there. Watching.

It’s hard to ignore. They’re never in the same place twice, and often they’re right in the way. They’re the ones without any routine. They’re the ones the spiders should be following. But the spiders follow me everywhere I go.

I ate one once, by accident. I was snoring and my mouth was open and I woke up to feel it sliding down my throat. I rushed to the bathroom where one stood on the toilet lid, but I didn’t throw up. I wanted to, but I didn’t.

I drive home with more spiders than I left with. They congregate with me. I can feel their eyes watching me. I would assume they are judging my driving if they were smart enough to do that. When I get home, one is waiting in the corner of my doorframe. I ignore it and walk in. I lock the door behind me. As if that will do anything.

The spiders are everywhere. In every room, in every building, they watch me. For years, they have watched me. But now there is one on every surface. They form groups on the walls, independent of species. It is not “harvestmen” or “attercops” covering the walls, just “spiders.”

And the mobs seem to grow. I watch as their webs build around the edges of the living room I have walked into from the entrance. They walk in lines across the floor and walls and ceiling to get to the room I’m in. Their webs begin to wall off doors and corners. I can’t see the couch, just the mob of spiders on the web above it.

I turn to exit the house but the webs are there too, covering the doorway and slowly expanding into the living room. They get closer and closer until there are too many spiders for the webs and they are crawling over each other to get to me.

I don’t stop them. It feels pointless to try. The spiders surround me, cover me, and I can feel the bites sink into the skin of my ankles and legs under my pants. The bites are shallow at first, almost gentle, and then begin to tear. They peel back my skin and begin to crawl deeper until the spiders cover me. Every bone, every muscle.

The spiders take me everywhere I go. I rarely see them anymore, but I can feel when a new one crawls up the remains of my leg and joins my tendons, pulling at them to push me where they want to be. I am not my own person, with my own thoughts and my own movements anymore. The spiders take me everywhere I go.

I wrote this story as a reaction to that factoid that was popular for a week a while back about how spiders learn your daily routine and avoid where you’d normally be.