In a corner…

by D.E. Bentley –

“Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time, the very walls are permeated

by their creative forces, which has, indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must

needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.”                  

Virginia Woolf

In the corner of the ceiling, where the walls come together in terse lines, sits a spider.

She sits silently on her web, unnoticed by the small flies that have found their way into this room past walls of thick concrete forming long, corridors divided by tall gates of steel. Despite random cleanings and lengthy room inspections, she has remained, alone with the room’s only other occupant. On the bed below her web sits a girl. She is adorned in a woman’s body; breasts erupting from beneath a navy blue pullover knit shirt. The shirt has a collar and two tidily fastened front buttons. The girl’s flat, slip-on shoes sit beside her on the floor; her legs are tucked up under her, concealed in straight navy pants. Her hair pulled back tight and neat on either side of her face, she looks up at the spider and begins a dialogue.

“So Sam (short for Samantha), how are you doing today? How patiently you wait for your dinner, resting on your magnificent bed of lace. Did you miss me while I was away tending to my studies? We can spend the rest of the night together. Perhaps I will read for a bit; we can talk more later if you want.” Accustomed to these exchanges and no longer fearful, the spider remained in quiet contemplation.

The girl leans back on a white clad pillow propped up at the head of her bed and opens a book somewhere in the middle. She removes a folded piece of tattered index card that serves as a bookmark and begins reading. Lost in the story, the girl laughs out loud or deeply sighs to express content or ill feelings toward a character or to rejoice in a particularly moving scene. Periodically she stops and looks up at the spider who remains seemingly content on her web. They sit, quiescent, as the shadows grow long and squeeze in through the small window, expanding into dark lines that stretch across the floor and continue up the opposite wall. The shadows dance in the moonlight that bathes the room in soft light. The girl replaces the index card on the open page, sets down her book and returns to the conversation with the spider.

“Well spider, she begins, look at how quietly you sit there; what a pleasant, kind spider you are. Oh, you like the way I’ve done my hair; why thank you; so nice of you to notice.”

The spider remains still and silent.

It is amazing, thinks the girl, how we remain. How peaceful and without ill will we accept our lives and share in the quiet solitude of our room. Looking down, the girl notices some papers on the floor; she picks them up and sets them on her table by the bed; she remains standing. The moonlight surrounds the girl’s bed into a misty aura as it reflects off floating particles of dust, the spider’s lace is illuminated in the soft rays and the girl watches her sitting, waiting, calm, as if all of time stretches out before her endlessly and nothing is of great importance.

Suddenly, the spider’s web shakes violently; she surges frantically forward and grabs her pray, a fly unfortunate enough to have wandered into her lair. Within seconds the spider has wrapped the fly into a tidy package of silken thread; eyeing her delicacy she rests. Her body, a round shining orb illuminated by the light, sits amidst an abstract disarray of severed lines.

The girl is not shocked; she has seen this transformation many times before, this quiet, restrained wait followed by frenzied action. She sits back down on the bed and watches the web as the vibrations slow; stillness returns as the spider resumes her quiet watch and meticulously mends each thread until the web appears untouched. The girl remains still as well, watching the moon that has come into view outside her small window. It hangs tethered inside a small circle of clouds that are illuminated in a soft pumpkin hue. Her hands rest on her knees; a tuft of hair falls free and drops to the side of her face; this is the only motion as the moon scurries under clouds drifting east and disappears beyond the window view.

Suddenly animated, as if an unseen hand had flipped a switch, her movements more

similar to an abandoned, intelligent machine waiting for serendipity to once again bring life to her rusted gears than the quiet child that lingered motionless for so long, the girl turns her head and gathers the stack of blank paper from the table. Like a magician procuring a lost coin from behind an ear or conjuring a white rabbit from a hat, she retrieves a silver pen from inside her shirt. As the last of the moon shadows fade she stretches out on the bed and begins writing.

Using the light that streams endlessly in from the hall, she writes feverishly without stopping, grasping each thought as it rises to the surface, released and thrown about in a violent imaginative storm after months of calm, hypnotic waves. The words burst out of their banks and spread in obedient rows across the parched paper earth; the accumulating pages cascade gracefully off the edge of the bed and blanket the floor.

Here, behind these walls, in her room within walls, within more walls. In this room where she spends hours alone, a never changing space that offers little more than silence and solitude, she has laid down the beating of hearts and the air filled lungs of life. She has laid bare the dark harshness of humanity and the hopes of a generation that many perceive as already lost.

To some she is a prisoner, kept here against her will. The girl knows better. In her fantasy escapes she travels to distant lands breathed into creation and bound in volumes stacked at her bedside; she creates worlds of words that fly off the pages, crawl through the bars and drift away into the night sky. Here, in her own room, in the pleasant company of her eight-legged arachnid companion, she holds pen in hand and knows that she is so much more.

Gathering the scattered papers she arranges them in order and places them in a neat stack on the table. Concealing her pen tidily away she bids goodnight to the spider that has consumed her ghastly meal and moves about daintily tidying her woven threads. The girl settles under blankets course and plain as clouds float swiftly past her window and out of view. Closing her eyes she drifts away.