After the Arachnid

James Gonda

In the shed behind the house where
garden tools lean in a corner there
was a spider, black and still, as large
as a thumbprint tucked behind a spade.
Her husband saw it first. It made no move,
not one, when he noted that’s a black widow
and reached for a hammer. What happened
next was routine and final. The steel head
descended, the spider burst, segments
exploded like the insides of a berry too ripe.
She felt something moist, a flick into her
eye, an intrusion, a presence, a small
wet moment.

By the time the ER’s white light met them
her eyelid had grown heavy, plus neck
pain, cramps in the legs, a strange buzzing
in her limbs like a radio between stations.
The nurse was kind. Doctors peered at
the red rim, discussed venom. Alpha-
latrotoxin, they said, can cross thin
membranes, can invade the bloodstream
through seeing. They took notes, offered
Benadryl, suggested calcium for cramping.
She refused it, gently, as one might decline
dessert. The conjunctiva, the report says,
was engorged, a word that seems abrasive
for the eye. She accepted the pill, declined
the drip, said the pain was manageable,
said she’d tough it out.

Her eye remained red for five days. The
cramps, longer. She says she sees fine,
nothing’s changed. She’s returned to
matching socks by faint differences in
shade, reading tiny print on laundry tags,
watching how tea darkens as it steeps, first
amber, then rust, examining eggshells for
hairline cracks in the grocery store. But
sometimes, she admits, when light catches
the edge of her vision just so, it flickers like
something half-seen, half-gone, refusing to
be named, not damage exactly but a shimmer
she cannot blink away.