Cheiracanthium

I light matches the same way I hold my pencils—close to the edge and with great focus. It takes me a few tries each time, no every time, and when it happens, I am always too close to the flame, and so I have to scrunch my fingers back like frantic inchworms. I still am burned a little with each candle. The matches are for candles and cigarettes of course but also for the fireplace. It’s a gas fireplace-the logs and rocks are made of fiberglass-which don’t burn with the gas-fed flames, but rather degrade when the walls and heat hit 1200. I flick my matches and pencils and my cigarettes at the fiberglass. The cars melted at 2500, but it was hot and there is and was power in those embers. We didn’t need those cars anyway.

My fingers are trembling right now as I light the wicks one by three by three but I keep the flames in the hearth turned down low. My fingers taste like gasoline. I know they are smelling me and my gasoline. Maybe I’ve always smelled like gasoline. When we had walked through the desert to climb to that plateau, we just wanted to push through the weight of summer. We had climbed and turned and saw the mountains and the valley and the browns of August and had been satisfied.

Tonight it is cold and it is not heavy like summer but rather like too much air in your lungs like at the top of that plateau. At the top, she’d let me play with her hair. I had twisted my long yellow strands with her curls, and covered our faces with our braids. When we climbed back down to the valley to our cars, we brought the hilltop back with us, or so it felt, but in reality, they had been with us for months.

They had gathered, first alone and then in families, drawn to our cars and the gas that they lust for without ceasing. They’re called Yellow Sacs, but ours are beige and legion. She always teased me about my fear of scorpions, of how I could destroy any spider on her bidding, but we hadn’t carried the yellow spiders then. I still think I am brave to face them then and to face them now. No, I know I am, but I’m not sure they know fear. I’m not sure I do either. I think I know panic—but that seems different. They live across the continent, but no matter where, they live to dig in and belong and consume.

I thought we brought them from the plateau. We began to drive home, the both of us clinging to solitude of our separate drives, but the spiders hadn’t waited. They had filled the creases and quiet spaces of her truck and then my jeep, lapping at the gasoline. The recall from the dealership later would say that it was like a drug for them, but I feel sad when I think about them lapping at our machines. What unknown horrors those spiders knew as our engines hurtled down to the desert, the dangers of the heat and the slicing iron and steel of our cars’ beating bodies. Maybe they knew panic.

Lightning was dancing on our city in the distance when the truck rolled. The spiders had ran from the engines to the vents to fly and fill our cars. They bit the air and the leather and our skin, searching for the gasoline, searching for the safety of the afternoon and the evening. I tore at my face and arms as they wrapped themselves around me, pumping venom into my bubbling skin. They just wanted our oil—the smell of it drove them to spasms, scientists later told the news, but I, I only could recognize the light of city, and the bawl of the metal bending in the crashing truck, and the searing pain as my car burned the spiders and the smell of gasoline around me.

Now I am awake and alone and lighting candles and cigarettes and the fireplace. I am alone but I know that the yellow sacs can smell the gasoline pumping through my winter home’s frozen frame. And they will come again with their families and their transients and their ropes and their venom. They will come to consume and I will wait and watch the lightning and braid my hair with my burned fingertips.