by Clarissa Fortin
We meet in the kitchen at 2am.
I’m in my toothpaste-stained dressing gown.
You’re sporting 15 pairs of hair-slim legs.
I stare down your faceted eyes wondering what I look like from all those receptors. Like the hideous spawn of a worm and a porcupine?
Because that’s what you look like. You look like the writhing child of Satan: a yellow-grey nightmare on dainty little feet.
I knew from the moment I saw you that it was my sanity or your
life.
Maybe if you hadn’t brushed against my hand when you galloped up out of the drain, maybe if it wasn’t 2am maybe if I could find it in my soul to rationalize that you are a harmless creature, a spider, wasp, cockroach and bed bug devourer, a uniquely fascinating nocturnal hunter that grooms and mates and survives alongside me as a co-habitor on this earth, maybe if the way you exist wasn’t so deeply offensively disturbing to me personally maybe things would end differently.
“Who sent you?” I ask.
It’s 2am and I think I’m Robert Frost talking to a white spider on a white heal-all, I think I’m being decisive against “darkness to appall” sent from a cruel God when I pursue your speeding body across the counter and triumphantly slam the Tupperware container down trapping you underneath.
I weight it down with books knowing how your respiratory system works, how it cannot abide dehydration.
And that is it.
I leave you there. Scuttle back to my room.
Lay in the dark air and think of you circling disgustingly until you suffocate.
I twist in my sheets and I twist in my mind troubled to find it a sometimes-hostile place: hard as an uncaring God and ugly as a harmless centipede.
Clarissa Fortin is a lover of poetry, a hater of centipedes, a hair-dye enthusiast, and a future dead person.