Suspension

The only black widow I’ve touched was dead when I found her in a carpeted corner of my father’s house, with her spiny forelegs hinged over to touch her own sternum, posed as if she had clutched her chest in shock or in prayer in her final moments. My stubby ten-year-old fingers struggled to delicately shift her into a drinking glass without crushing her limbs. She seemed brittle, but heavier than I’d expected, and her abdomen clinked gently like a marble inside the cup. Her body was glossy but dry, as if she were a glass-blown capsule filled with black ink.

At birth, she and her siblings had chewed their way out of their egg sack and into fresh air, brimming out of the breakage like cream-colored foam and traversing the damp soil or floating on the breeze via their first silk ribbons. Some undoubtedly emerged and quickly gave in to hunger, cannibalizing an adjacent brother or sister. Settling like ash, the survivors coated the small island and matured.

At the time, I figured that she should have died near her siblings where they had all hatched, over on the little man-made island across the little man-made lake next to the house. That mini-island was maybe 50 paces across, home to several palms and invasive eucalyptuses, fringed along its perimeter by tall reeds reaching as high as 8 feet up from the water’s surface. Many adult females of this brood would climb up aquatic stalks and grasses to get the best view and suspend their webs between two or three tall reeds, weaving an elastic, vertical net at the ideal height to catch the breeze and the breeze’s six-legged commuters. And this summer, unlike any other, those reeds were filled with young black widows, swaying in their penthouse webs, having built a translucent skyline of silk skyscrapers.

I brought her corpse to our makeshift eBay-sourced lab desk, which revolved around a transmission microscope from the 80’s. Delicately, I nudged her out of the glass and into the light, rotating the rubber knobs to bring her into focus. Finally, I could peer down through stacked lenses at her magnified spear-like limbs, vampiric blood red hourglass pattern, and her swollen abdomen, which I presumed incorrectly to be filled with her venom, supposedly 15 times more powerful than a rattle snake’s venom, drop for drop. I felt far too reverent to dissect her, remembering the dead bee I had found a few weeks prior, whose stinger I had pulled out, a movement which to my horror also unraveled its innards. Immediately I understood why stinging us killed them. I feared inducing any similar surprises from the spider.

I cast my mind over the water, wondering what it was like to be suspended in one of those lakefront cats-cradle webs. What it must be like to live in your own volume of the sky, feeling the warm California valley wind around your entire body, from above and below, bringing food to you, blowing any chitin shed off of you. And after being removed, (perhaps you floated accidentally into a canoe and were brought over the water, latched onto to a pant leg in fear) did you search with your forelegs for the familiar chemical combinations of the delta murk, the steam rising off the soil, the acidic cormorant waste, picked-over fish bones, and algae at high noon, did you wait in a room for the familiar vibrations of insects humming above and of trout below? I wondered if she had a mind that could recall her homeland and its smells as she passed away. Or did she simply wait, hunt, and die, alert and unchanging, in a 90 degree angle of carpet and asbestos? If, while alive, she’d had the means to return, would she have tried?

I hope my ten-year-old self returned her to the soil outside beside the lake. That’s what I usually did with the larger bugs I examined, and for most I would make a burial mound out of tree bark and grass shoots, but I don’t remember. I only recall the feelings of the awe I felt toward her formidable corpse, magnified to fill my field of view, and the sense of displacement I projected onto her, aware that she was far from her own, while so many of her family were thriving - waiting, hunting, and dying much like she did, but doing it all together - in a city of silk across the water.