Emily Mitchell - Viral - Stories

I closed the front door after me, and the house wrapped me in its gentle quiet. Lisa was at her friend Kadesha’s house that afternoon and therefore so was Spider. For once, I had the place entirely to myself. I sat down at the kitchen table and was going through the mail when I heard, from upstairs, a sound I couldn’t understand: a soft but certain flapping like somebody was shaking out a bed sheet. I listened and it came again: a noise like a sail filling with wind. Was there a burglar up there making the beds?

I went upstairs and walked along the corridor looking in each room until I came to Lisa’s. The door was shut, so I pushed it open and went in. The room was arranged just as always: bookshelves and chest of drawers against one wall, bed against the opposite, the row of stuffed animals along the windowsill between. But as I looked I saw that over everything was a layer of thin, diaphanous threads connecting all the objects like a net. The threads were translucent and barely visible, but when I took a step inside I found that they were all around me, clinging to my skin and clothes. I stopped and tried to shake them loose, but they were sticky and would not come off. In the slanting afternoon light, they were silver, shimmering, and I could see that they all led toward one corner where they spiraled up into a dense silky canopy right over Lisa’s bed. It was billowing gently in the light breeze that came in through the open window; this was what I had heard from downstairs.

I stared around me, partly entranced and partly horrified. How long had the web been there? Why hadn’t Lisa told me about it? I felt a surge of anger, a feeling of betrayal. She had kept it secret. She knew I wouldn’t like it and she was protecting her Spider by hiding it from me. But then I thought: why hadn’t I seen it for myself? I tried to think of when I was last in my daughter’s room and, with a lurch of shame, I realized that it had been several days, almost a week. How was that possible? Lisa had become so self-sufficient, not even needing me to tuck her in at night. And I had been glad to let her take herself upstairs, to look in on her later and see that she was sleeping peacefully; in the small glow of the nightlight I had not noticed all the fibers that were crisscrossing her room.

I went downstairs and got a broom out of the closet. I came back and, brandishing it in front of me, began to try to sweep away the strands. Where there were just a few, they snapped and cleared away. But where they were denser they were strong, and in the corner over Lisa’s bed the broom got stuck. I pulled it but I could not get it loose.

It dawned on me how strange it was that until now Spider had not made a web. Why would it start all of sudden like this? I left the broom where it was and went down to get my tablet from my purse. I pulled up the owner’s manual for Spider on the site of the company that had manufactured it. I looked through the manual, but it said nothing about web-spinning, only that in the event of any malfunctioning you should bring your companion back to the facility where you got it as soon as possible.

This was a malfunction. Wasn’t it? It definitely was, and therefore Spider would have to go back to the facility. I remember that I stood there in the middle of my living room and almost whooped with unexpected joy. I had not known until then just how much I wanted to get rid of Spider. A strange thought came to me that Spider knew perfectly well how much I disliked it, that it had watched me and perhaps tried to find ways to keep me at a distance from my daughter so that she would keep it safe from me. But then I thought how ridiculous and paranoid that would sound to someone else. What had it done all these months except what it was meant to do?

As soon as possible , the manual said. That meant I’d have to break the news to Lisa when she got home. She would be upset of course. She would not like the prospect of letting Spider go. But what else could we do? We could not have it covering our house in a net of sticky threads. That would not be safe. I would tell her gently, calm but firm, and then we would drive together in the morning to the facility and she could pick out a replacement, a dog or gerbil or maybe that nice butterfly. I could already feel the contentment I would experience during that ride home, the sense that I was taking charge the way a parent is supposed to do. Lisa might not like it right away, but she would come to understand eventually that what I’d done was for the best.

Why had I lived for so long in a situation that made me so uncomfortable? At that moment, it seemed inexplicable.

I put the manual away and started thinking about dinner. I’d make one of Lisa’s favorites, macaroni-cheese maybe, which might make her less unhappy when I told her that Spider had to go away. I started taking ingredients out of the cupboard, mixing and combining them, as I waited for my daughter and her spider to come home.

It must have been an hour or so later that the doorbell rang to let me know my girl was home. I went to get the door, looked outside, waved to Kadesha’s mother, who was sitting in her car. She waved back then drove away as Lisa came inside.

There was Spider on her shoulder, with its legs folded together so it looked even more like a strange inhuman hand than usual. Lisa was in a happy mood. She had spent a lovely afternoon at the playground in the park. She twirled into the living room, telling me about how they fed the ducks, got ice cream, played on the swings and on the slide. She was cheerful all through dinner, sent Spider up to her room without being asked, cleaned her plate and even ate her broccoli. I gave her ice cream for dessert and waited until she had almost finished it before I cleared my throat and said:

“Lisa, sweetheart, there’s something that I have to talk to you about.”

She looked up at me with her enormous, lovely eyes and I thought I saw a flicker of alarm pass through them, but I might have just imagined that.

“I saw what Spider did up in your room,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. She looked down at her plate.

“I’m not mad at you because you didn’t tell me about it, although you probably should have told me. But we can’t have Spider making that kind of mess inside the house. It’s not okay.”

“But I like it,” Lisa said. “Spider made it especially for me. He can take it down if I ask him to. And he promises he won’t do it again. ”

“Sweetheart, even if he did promise not to do it again, Spider isn’t supposed to make a web at all. It means there’s something wrong with him. Like he’s sick and needs to go to the hospital. We’re going to take him back to the place where we got him so that they can make him better.”

Lisa looked stricken, a deer caught in the headlights of a car.

“Spider has to go away?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps not forever. But for a while at least.”

I saw my daughter flinch and her eyes darted upward in the direction of her room where Spider was. Then she looked back at me. In her expression, there was something I’d never seen before. Her eyes were narrowed like she was angry but also like she was suspicious, like I was someone she had to watch out for. It was a look that I’d seen a few times on her father when I started to find out about the secrets he had kept from me, the money he had used without my knowing, the late-night phone calls to a number that I didn’t recognize. But I’d never seen it on my daughter until now.

“Mama,” she said, “you don’t like my Spider do you?”

Don’t lie, I told myself. “No, sweetheart. I don’t really like him much.”

“What did Spider ever do to you?” she said.

“Nothing. It’s just. ”

“You can’t,” Lisa interrupted. “You can’t take him away!”