Phobia
by Oliver Kammeyer
He slid off her, and she could hear him suppress a burp when he passed her rib. He was sweaty. Somehow so was she, and she barely did anything. Once he was off her, he sat up on his knees at the end of the bed and looked at her, holding her hostage with the sincerity in his eyes.
“I love you,” he said. “I know I’ve said that before, but it feels different tonight. It feels more significant, like this could be something significant. Do you feel that too or am I just hoping you do?”
Her head went up and then it went down. He smiled and then he leaned over and kissed her. She smiled back as he pulled away.
He lay there on her for some time, it was probably only a few minutes, but she thought she saw shadows panning across her apartment walls. After some time, he put on his pants, his shoes, and kissed her goodbye and left.
She showered just after that.
When she came back out into her bedroom that was also her living room, she was in her robe and sat down on her couch. She picked up a home and garden magazine off her coffee table. Before she opened it though, she noticed something black and tiny crawling by her front door. A living spot is what she saw. She got close to it, seeing that it was a spider, and got a little closer on her hands and knees, seeing that it was a black widow.
It knew she was watching, she could see in its stillness. She didn’t move for a minute, staring at the widow. Once she was entirely still, even her wet hair motionless on her scalp, the widow began moving again. One thin, sharp, black leg languidly moved at a time, centimeter by centimeter bringing the widow across the floorboard.
The more she stared, the more she saw. Its many shiny and lifeless but mesmerizing eyes were like river stones on the night of a full moon. She had failed to count the widow’s many eyes many times before she noticed it was on her hand.
The widow weighed much less than the feather of a baby bird, but her hand felt held down by it; the spot where it stood between her thumb and her pointer finger felt heavy. Once in place on her hand, the widow didn’t move, didn’t shift one sharp leg, like it felt her pulse through her skin. Suddenly and steadily, her hand lifted and brought the still spider higher up. Not a move. Her hand was completely still.
She looked down at its pinpoint of a black head and felt the widow looking back up at her. She thought a water droplet might fall from her hair onto the widow and scare it into biting as she moved back to the couch. She sat back down and brought her hand level to her eyes. The widow inched between two of her knuckles, and she stared at the spot on its black head which looked like her mouth. She couldn’t see her fangs. Were they retractable? Presumably they were sharp. If it was going to bite, would it rear back and give her time to react?
The widow was moving at an easygoing pace up her arm, to her bicep, closer and closer to her center of body heat and away from her could extremities. Then she saw herself in the mirror on the opposite side of the room where she was holding her arm up completely still, and the widow couldn’t be seen. To this widow, she was like an Everest, a living mountain that could kill the spider at any moment, but the spider could do the same. And here, Everest was immobile, while the widow crawled up higher and higher.
With it on her shoulder, she relaxed her arm on the cushion. She didn’t tense any of her muscles. The spider’s significant but absent weight had become like the feeling of room temperature. On her shoulder, the widow rested, and she let her own weight fall into the back of the couch.
She put her fingers to her shoulder and the widow crawled back onto her hand. She neither tensed nor had to think about her movements as she got up and walked back to the place near the door where she found the widow, and she let her down on the floorboard. She stayed there, looking at her for a moment, and then they both went back to their own spots: she to her magazine on the couch, and the widow presumably to her web.
Just then there was a knock on the door, and before she could get up to answer it or even ask who was there, he opened the door and came back in.
She stared at him, her mouth slammed shut to keep all the words she wanted to say locked up, and she pulled the top of her robe closed.
“Well, I was thinking,” he said. “You said things were tight, and I was thinking that I could help you with this month’s rent, but then I started thinking…”
He got down on one knee.
“Will you marry me? I’ll have a ring later.”
Just then he jumped up from the ground and started stomping around the floorboards.
“Shit. Shit!” he said. “Spider, there’s a spider. I think it’s a black widow. Did I get it?”
Oliver Kammeyer was born in Tucson, AZ where he currently lives and received his BA in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. He earned his MFA at Emerson College in Boston, MA and his currently finishing his first novel. His work has appeared in Free Spirit, Fiction on the Web, Collective Exile, and Glimmer Train. He can be found on Instagram @oliver_kammeyer89.