Author: Katherine Sanger

She reflected on “The Metamorphosis” and discovered that she was jealous of Gregor Samsa. Sure, he woke up and found himself a giant cockroach, and that sucked for him. But she’d fallen asleep watching a made-for-TV-movie on the couch and woken up to find a giant, person-sized spider sitting in the wingback chair in the living room. It hadn’t gone away since.
She didn’t try to engage it – him? her? how did you tell on a spider? – in conversation. Not that she wasn’t curious about how it had gotten there or why it had gotten there or even when it had gotten there, but she was afraid that talking to it would somehow make it more real or that it might provide answers to all those questions. The truth may have been scarier than her imagination. And her imagination made it pretty damn scary.
Friends stopped coming over. No one wanted to see the giant spider. At least, not more than once. It was too unnatural and unreal. No one would help her get rid of it, either. It seemed that everyone feared it, and attacking a human-sized spider made even the bravest turn away. In private, she was told that some worried it wasn’t the only one of its kind; that there might be a revenge-killing or mass migration of human-sized spiders in the area if they killed this one. She couldn’t blame them. The thought of taking it on was frightening. The thought of an army of them appearing was beyond horrifying.
So the spider just kept sitting in her wing back chair. Sometimes, when she’d go out, she’d come back to find it had drained a stray dog or cat and left the body on the carpet. She disposed of the carcasses, crying every time, but the spider needed to eat, and it was controlling the homeless pet population. She assured herself that at least it wasn’t going after children or other people. She didn’t know how the spider caught the animals, if it had a web somewhere or some other magic spider way of getting them. Honestly? She felt better not knowing.
Life went on that way.
Until one day she came home and found two surprises. One was a dead dog on the carpet. The other was a huge egg sack on the spider’s back, large enough to make the spider lean forward uncomfortably in the wing back chair, like a reverse pregnant woman in her final month of gestation.
That night, she packed a bag with trinkets, mementos, and pictures she couldn’t live without. Before dawn, she crept to her car and drove away from the town, from her house, from the wing back chair, and from the spider with its pulsating sack of eggs.