Last Breath

2

The spider hung in her web, inches from her prey.

Gavin Treat leaned closer, watching. This was the good part. She would feed.

Yesterday evening he had released a cricket into the five-gallon terrarium that occupied a corner of his bedroom. Last night the cricket, hopping frantically, became entangled in the funnel-shaped web. Though it struggled, its efforts had only lashed it more tightly to the gluey strands.

Now it lay still. It had given up. It faced its own end with the equanimity born of unrewarded suffering.

The spider began to prowl.

Treat watched the eight legs navigate the mesh of quivering threads. The spider moved lightly, in a calm, unhurried gait.

She was a western black widow, Latrodectus hesperus, and Treat loved her as much as he could love anything. He had raised her from a spiderling after finding her and others of her brood scurrying amid a drift of timber in the mountains near Malibu. He remembered the thrill of the discovery and the care with which he had gathered up a dozen of the small darting shapes, loading them into a plastic sandwich bag and sealing the flaps.

Most of the spiderlings had died before maturity, but this one and a single male one-quarter her size had both survived. The male, of course, had perished after mating, devoured by the female. A papery egg sack now hung on the web. Soon it would open, releasing hundreds of babies.

He had never named the spider. He did not think of her as a pet. She was an avatar of darkness, a creeping symbol of predatory death. He admired her sleek beauty-the glossy black orb of her abdomen, the balletic precision of her gliding legs, and the jaws with their embedded fangs.

The cricket twitched. The spider moved faster, spurred by the shiver of the web.

Treat pressed his face to the terrarium’s side panel. He had pulled down the shades of his bedroom windows to keep glare off the glass. The only light in the room was the glow of a forty-watt bulb in a gooseneck lamp overhanging the terrarium’s screen cover.

The widow reached her prey. Treat knew the procedure she must follow, having witnessed it countless times. She would blanket the cricket in a silken attack wrap, and then her fangs would poison the prey, paralyzing it. Those same fangs would pump out digestive juices, and the cricket would soften, the enzymes doing their work outside the spider’s body. Finally the victim’s gelatinous form would be sucked into the widow’s mouth.

He did not think it was an unpleasant death. Once immobilized by silk and venom, the cricket would know only the slow dissolution of its body in a bath of chemicals. It would simply fade away, its decomposition effected before death.

There were worse ways to die.

Treat knew all about that.

The spinning of the silk began. At some point during the ritual Treat remembered the sandwich in his hand. He had made it himself after coming home for his lunch hour. He had not guessed that it would be the widow’s lunch hour as well.

He took small, distracted bites of the sandwich-tomato slices, feta cheese, and bean sprouts between two slabs of date-raisin bread-feeding along with the widow.

He watched her, rapt, until the cricket was entirely gone. Idly he wondered where the cricket’s music went when it died. Perhaps the same place that women’s screams went.

He finished his sandwich, swallowing a last wedge of bread and bean sprouts, with a soft, precise smack of his lips.

The spider lay on her web, digesting her food, sated. From this angle Treat could clearly see the distinctive mark common to all black widow females-the maroon hourglass on the underside of her belly.

The hourglass, symbol of time. Wasn’t it Ovid who called time the devourer of all things?

They made an unholy trinity. Treat thought-time, the widow, and himself.