Long Legs

When Martin Brown went for walks, he didn’t think in terms of steps. At seventy-seven years old, he actually had little interest in extending his life. If anything, he was hoping the nine plus miles his lanky frame traversed around his hilly neighborhood each and every day might eventually be the thing that takes it.

In his head, if he timed it perfectly, he could collapse and die right in front of the fire station at the bottom of the hill where paramedics could scoop him up and drop him off at the morgue, thus saving a neighbor the trauma of playing detective when the smell of his forgotten corpse wafts through an open kitchen window and ruins an otherwise pleasant spring afternoon.

Martin’s wife Leena had already been gone for three years. Her illness came on fast and took her quickly. His daughters flew in from Portland and Phoenix to be there in Leena’s last days, plan a service, and make sure their dad knew how to use the washing machine and dishwasher.

Not that Martin used much of either. He only generated two plates a day, so it was easier to hand wash both items at the end of the night and place them on top of the twelve plate stack. He sometimes stood and thought about those other ten plates. He wondered when the last time they had been used. He wondered if Leena’s fingerprints were still on them.

Leena was boisterous. She was the flame. Martin enjoyed going to parties with her and entering a few steps behind just so he could watch her presence fill the room. She remembered everyone’s names, even people she hadn’t seen for years. She asked great questions. But she wasn’t a bulldozer. She was tender. And real. Her ability to be vulnerable, even with strangers, often left her holding someone close in a grocery store aisle as they wept on each other’s shoulders.

Without her, Martin’s life was small. And quiet. Old friends had tried to fill the void. In the months after her death, he received invitations for dinners but failed to carry conversations the way he could with Leena there. In his mind, such interactions exposed him for the dud that he was in a world without her.

And so Martin walked. A death march, if you will. He regularly passed people in his neighborhood who smiled or waved. He could muster a nod but little more. Eventually they got the drift. Everyone except for the tiny Filipino lady on the corner. He couldn’t pass her house without drawing her to him like a magnet.

“Good morning, Martin! How are you?”

“Good afternoon, Martin! Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

“Good evening, Martin! Where did you get that jacket?”

It wasn’t the friendly greeting that irked him. It was her follow up question that demanded a response. That forced him to think.

“I’m fine.”

“Yes, it is.”

“I don’t remember.”

Martin tried adjusting the timing of his walks to avoid her but it made no difference. She was always home. Usually in the garden. And always watching.

She was mentally ill, he concluded. Why else would you stalk someone like she stalked him? If he wanted to talk, he would make it obvious. He would look up. He would slow down. He would make the ninety degree right turn from the public sidewalk up her cobblestone walkway. He did none of those things!

He needed to look for Leena’s fingerprints. That always calmed him down when he was upset. He opened her medicine cabinet. The girls had thrown out her pills but at his request had left the rest: perfumes, lotions, and an empty brass bowl where she once kept her earrings. He leaned in close to the bowl, hoping to find her familiar finger stamps, but was stopped short when instead he saw:

A spider.

A daddy long-legs to be precise.

The eight-legged creature sat comfortably in the bowl like it was his own personal terrarium. Like he’d been there for years. It was possible he had been.

Leena loved animals. It didn’t matter how big and scary or small and creepy they were. On one famous occasion a baby opossum had found its way into their kitchen during a 4th of July barbecue and while other women screamed and grabbed their children, Leena bent down, picked it up by the tail, and tossed it back into the bushes.

Martin could only assume this spider instinctively knew there was no safer place in this whole house than at the bottom of Leena Brown’s brass bowl.

“Oh.” Martin said. “Hello.”

The spider did not move. Martin, out of mutual respect, closed the cabinet and let him be.

But the next morning, he couldn’t help but check on his new tenant. This time he was out of the bowl and working on a web near some expired mouthwash. Martin leaned in closer to inspect the web. It was irregular — downright messy actually — not the structured web one might find with a garden spider. Martin’s curiosity was piqued.

He walked all the way to the library. “I’m looking for a book on daddy long-legs spiders,” Martin told the librarian.

Martin returned with a stack of selections and culled the pertinent information onto a few pages of notebook paper.

Daddy long-legs aka cellar spiders aka pholcidae arachnida…

He discovered that unlike most spiders, the daddy long-legs cannot produce webs with any adhesive property and therefore use their inconsistent layout to lure their prey into a false sense of safety, then attack quickly.

As for their diet, he learned they survive on a steady stream of small insects but were not choosy about which kind. Martin couldn’t imagine there were many good options behind Leena’s bottles. And he didn’t want his new roommate to venture too far away from that bowl if he didn’t have to.

Martin walked along the sliding glass door to the backyard with a flashlight. He stopped when he saw a dead fly sitting undisturbed in the dust-filled track.

“Perfect,” he said.

Martin carried the fly from the living room to the bathroom with a pair of needle-nosed pliers and opened the medicine cabinet.

“I brought you dinner,” he said. With the precision of a trained surgeon, Martin placed the fly in the center of its web. In a flash, the spider was on the move. Martin pulled up a chair from his wife’s vanity and watched with satisfaction as the daddy long-legs wrapped the fly in his silky web then inserted his tiny fangs into the fly’s soft brain.

“I knew you were hungry,” Martin said. Not wanting the spider to feel uncomfortable, Martin warmed up a frozen meal in the microwave and joined him at the bathroom sink.

Martin brought his spider books to bed and kept reading. He learned that daddy long-legs have been found on every continent, even Antarctica. And how a high percentage of humans are convinced they’re deadly when they’re totally harmless. And how they walk with an alternating tetrapod gait which keeps them stable despite the ridiculous length of their legs. “Maybe I should try a tetrapod gait,” Martin joked to himself as he turned off his bedside lamp.

Martin was up early the next morning and made a beeline to the bathroom. “Good morning, Long Legs,” Martin called out. He had decided overnight that they had reached a point in their relationship where he could give him a nickname. He found his friend working on an even larger web in a different corner of the cabinet near Leena’s favorite face cream. “Is this you setting the table?” Martin quipped.

Long Legs kept his head down and kept spinning while Martin traipsed to the backyard and returned with a still wiggling beetle. Once Long Legs had the beetle safely wrapped, Martin put on his sneakers. “You might need some extra time with that one,” he declared before closing the cabinet and heading for the front door.

He was in such good spirits that he entirely forgot about the Filipino woman on the corner.

“Well don’t you look happy this morning,” she called out, lifting her dopey face from behind a bright green azalea.

Martin’s smile dropped. Before he could stop himself, he had what he felt was a perfectly worthy response:

“How often does that stupid shrub need to be trimmed anyway?”

The woman was thrown, but only for a moment. She was more shocked by getting any answer at all than she was by its caustic nature.

“Well this one’s a real piece of work,” she replied with a smile. “So as many times as it takes.”

Martin grumbled and kept walking. Any hope that his rudeness might shut her up for good were dashed. He decided to take the shorter loop and go home to check on Long Legs instead.

He opened the medicine cabinet and was amazed to see the beetle was long dead and sucked flat. Long Legs sat on top of him, satisfied. Martin pushed in close to get a good look at his favorite spider, his nose nearly touching the web. Long legs didn’t budge. “Someone looks sleepy,” Martin concluded.

Taking his cue from the spider, Martin slipped out of his walking shoes and crawled back into his bed as well. As much as he wanted to sleep, his mind kept circling back to that dumb woman. With her dumb clippers and her dumb smile and her dumb questions. Leena never asked a dumb question. Ever!

He marched back to the bathroom and opened the cabinet. Long Legs was where Martin left him.

“Why did Leena have to die first?” Martin asked.

Long Legs stayed silent. Martin took that as permission to keep going.

“If I had gone first, that would have been better. Because Leena would have been fine. She would have met someone else. Within six months I bet. Probably less. She would have had a whole second life. Fun, travel, romance. And I would have been okay with that. But no. She had to get sick. She had to leave me behind. And it’s not fair. I’m not built to be alone.”

Tears filled the bags beneath Martin’s eyes. It was the first time he had cried since Leena’s death. Long Legs watched for a few seconds, then tiptoed behind a bottle of Tums. When Martin realized he was gone, he dried his eyes with his sleeve and quietly shut the medicine cabinet.

Time for another walk.

This time he needed a long one. The woman on the corner, for once, was not waiting for him. Good. He knew he had crossed a line. Not just with her, but with Long Legs. That little spider never asked for all of that. He thought he had found a quiet place in a forgotten brass bowl where he could live in silence by himself and then along came this sad old man, bearing his soul without even stopping to ask if this eight-legged insect even wanted to hear about it. Martin realized he was just like the lady on the corner. Or maybe even worse.

He walked ten miles. Up and down the hills. No food. No water. It was almost dark when he returned home. He went to the bathroom then washed his hands. Before he turned off the light, he stared at the closed medicine cabinet. He couldn’t leave things the way he had, with Long Legs seeing him as some blubbery, fragile mess. He needed to apologize for the outburst. For the emotion. He wanted to promise him that he would not be bothering him again.

Martin opened the cabinet. Long Legs was not in the brass bowl. He wasn’t hiding behind the perfume either. He didn’t see him anywhere.

“Long Legs?” Martin said.

Out of the corner of his eye, something moved. There was Long Legs. Clutching the inside of the cabinet door. And dangling at his side, without any explanation… a second daddy long-legs.

The pair of spiders didn’t move. They knew they had been caught. How long this had been going on Martin could only guess. What Martin knew for sure was that despite all the research showing that daddy long-legs could not harm humans, he felt stung.

Martin put one hand on the edge of the sink to steady himself. Then Martin reached down with his other hand, out of sight of Long Legs and his lover, and removed his left sneaker.

He gripped it tightly, sole side facing out, then lifted it high above his head.

But before he could smash it flat against the medicine cabinet… Martin Brown collapsed.

His daughters became nervous when he didn’t answer their weekly phone call. The paramedics from the bottom of the hill found Martin on the bathroom floor. Only wearing one shoe. Dehydrated. But alive.

After a few days in the hospital, Martin returned home. He opened Leena’s medicine cabinet. The two spiders were nowhere to be found. He cleaned out their webs. And then the old bottles. And tubes. Everything except for the brass bowl.

Then Martin Brown put on his sneakers and went for a walk. When he got to the house on the corner, he slowed down, turned right, and headed up the cobblestone walkway.

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