We choose our next meal carefully. Once, we scuttled through the damp dark, hiding our legs and bulging thoraxes, creeping into midnight villages to crawl into sleeping mouths, but no longer. The ease bored us after centuries of secrecy. Now, we make them come to us.

​

He’s a man who leaves the warm walls of his home every morning, waxy sandwiches packed from a doting wife, and ventures forth into our mountains. Up our misty hills, he ascends further and further from the few-limbed creatures of his village. In the silent woods that fur our mountains like the hide of a dragon, the man snaps branches off brittle trees and makes small fires on the fallen leaves. The thin plumes of smoke wind up into the sky, closer every day, and we taste the air with the hair on our legs, quivering with delight. But we wait, and watch.

​

These are old mountains, spiteful ones, that resent the hard footstep of two-legged beasts. We follow his shoe prints, find the places he often treads, and take note of the places he hasn’t. One night, as he sits and stares into the fire, we send one of our smallest spiders to creep into his knapsack. The man doesn’t notice—he fixates on the flickering flames with the loneliness of a desperate man. We know he wishes that it was this glow, and not the light of his home, that he could return to each night. When he finally rises to his feet with a groan and sweeps the knapsack over his shoulder, our little scout listens to the churning of the unhappy house.

​

“Out in the mountains again?” his wife sniffs.

​

“Don’t act like you care,” he grunts and settles down at the kitchen table with the clink of silverware. “You’ve clearly managed the house and the boy well enough on your own.”

​

“Not by choice,” she mutters, but the man isn’t looking at her. Rather, his eyes are fixed out the square of glass that, from this distance, seems to frame the whole mountain. “Our son is struggling in his lessons, and we have debts that are due. But you’re too absent to know that, aren’t you?”

​

“None of that matters!” he protests. “We need to go back to living the simple life.”

​

“Then why did you agree to this one?”

​

He moves the food she made him around his plate like a child. “I thought it would be how it was when I was a boy. Back when things were good, and married life looked easy, and fatherhood demanded less.”

​

His woman shakes her head. “There was no such world. For you or for me. You think I’m happy keeping house all day? I do it for our son.”

​

The boy joins them when he returns from school, ink staining his fingers from where he toiled over his arithmetic and ink on his cheeks from where he put his face in his hands in frustration. He has the round face of a boy just emerging from youth, with the experiences of a child but the growing mind of a young man. The man thinks the boy considers himself cleverer than he is—a recipe for disrespect.

​

“Oh, darling." The woman takes a wet washcloth from the kitchen and wipes her son’s face clean. “How were classes?”

​

“Doesn’t matter,” he grunts. “Don’t want to talk about it.”

​

“You’ll speak to your damn mother when she talks to you!” the man snaps at him.

​

The woman fixes her husband with a look. “I wonder where he gets it from.”

​

“Unbelievable! It’s my fault?” It seems to him that fatherhood was mainly about placing blame.

​

“All I’m saying is he could do with a more present father. . . "

​​

The man snorts in disbelief and pushes his plate away. “Going to bed,” he spits, and tosses his knapsack onto the floor of his bedroom.​

​

_____________________________________________________________________________​

 

 

That night, our spider crawls out of his bag and creeps across the floor. It scales his bedposts and puts one careful hairy leg after another into his ear. There, perched atop his eardrum, it listens to his dreams and reports back to us. 

 

He imagines a better world for himself.

Somewhere he can live without the shackles of family and responsibility.

He thinks that somewhere in the mountains, he will find it.

​

There, deep among the woods, a sound rises: it is the rubbing together of a million legs. That night, we go to work. Under the stars, we weave webs of sparkling silver. They glisten with more than just moonlight: they sing, like a tuning fork, at a volume only he can hear. Now, with constellations both above and below, we wait.

​

The next day, the man leaves his family once again and stomps up into the mountains. The sun hits us just right, and he sees us. Or rather, he sees what we want him to see. The wind strums our webs and sends him whispers. Instead of our intricate geometry of death, he sees a palace of floating gardens, where beautiful young women twist and laugh like the fox-fairies he grew up hearing tales of.

​

The man gasps and stumbles forward in disbelief. Then, he breaks into a run. This is the world he wished to grow up into, a life of excitement, where he doesn’t have to return to a house of duty and disappointment. He races over fallen tree trunks and through the clearings in the trees. Just as he approaches the bluffs that separate him from the nests of our shadowy brood, we dull our webs. The glow disappears, and so do we. When he crests the bluffs, we are gone. We watch him retreat and grin with our many teeth. He is a man hungry for change, and his curiosity is piqued.

 

“I know what I saw,” he insists to his wife, trying to catch his breath on the house’s threshold.

​

“You’re a fool,” she scoffs. “The altitude is going to your head.”

 

“You’d know if you came with me! I’ll show you!” he says, but he knows the utopia on the hill was meant for him and him alone. How would his stringent wife enjoy the beautiful fox-fairy maidens? How would his son appreciate the floating gardens? He couldn’t let another person into the world that would soon be his.

 

“Dad?” His son emerges from the bedroom, drawn out by the sound of their argument. “What’s going on?” 

 

“When I was walking in the mountains, I noticed that on the fallen bluffs there was a glare like that from a mirror. It must be a fairyland,” he tells him. The woman snorts doubtfully, but he ignores her. “Today I will say farewell to you.”

 

“What? Why? I—I don’t understand.” His son looks out the window at the view of the mountains. “Dad, I don’t see anything.”

 

“You wouldn’t,” he dismisses him, throwing his knapsack onto the kitchen table. “It’s for me.”

 

The woman crumples onto the floor. “I knew this day would come. I knew you’d abandon this family.”

 

“Dad. . . ” His son’s face curves into a mask of disgust. “How could you do this? To me and to Mom?”

 

“You wouldn’t understand,” he says. “Not yet, at least. Give it a few years: become a man, take a woman, wait for the love to fade as your child is born. When you’re a father, you’ll know. And when you do, I’ll be in the fairyland, waiting for you.”

​

He slams the door and heads into the mountains, feeling almost like floating as he ascends towards our web. His future is waiting—the right future, the one he deserves.

​

As he approaches us, our whispering webs hum at a higher frequency. The visions of fox-fairy maidens begin to dance with a frenzy, moving faster and faster like ripples across a rainy river. If he would watch the figures with more care, he’d notice how they flicker in and out, revealing too many obsidian legs and a glimpse of curving mandibles. The floating gardens seep pus like malignant growths out of the earth. But the man is too caught up in his reverie.

​

Our spy sends a message to our brood—the woman has picked up her husband’s knapsack and sees something scurrying inside. She leaps back and dumps out our spider listening from within. With a yelp, she kicks it away, breaking its legs and sending it rolling onto its back. She can tell this is no ordinary spider by the intelligent gleam in its eyes. As it watches in agony, she gathers her son and their sharpest blades and follows her wayward husband into the mountains. Our spy is worried, but we know they’ll never make it in time.

​

As the man approaches the bluffs, he throws himself into the circle of light. His foot crosses the threshold, and our webs fold up like a flytrap, closing in around him. Held fast by the oozing confines, he lets out a long howl. We cocoon his mouth shut, wrapping him up round and around until he is merely a web in the shape of a man. But we leave his eyes unwrapped—we want him to see who we truly are. We emerge from the shadows, cracking our many joints and letting the hair across our bodies rise in anticipation. Our brood runs out behind us, young things who are eager to learn to hunt as we do. We see it in his eyes when he realizes: there is no escape, and he is easy prey because he has severed all ties with his loved ones.

​

Then we close up his eyes and draw taut our webs, tightening and tightening, until his head gives way.

​

Something sharp pierces our defenses, and we retreat with a hiss. The woman slashes away at the webs, her son stomping us as they fight their way onto our bluff. Our children scramble to escape from the blade and boot. But they are too slow: he quashes them into pulp, and she splits them head from thorax. We let out a high chitter of anger and grief, but the woman and her son do not seem to hear. We are forced to cut our losses, descending into the bluff and scattering across the mountain.

​

The woman catches and cradles her husband’s body as it drops from its suspension, carefully removing the webs from his face. She sees our silvery ropes stained with blood and closes the man’s eyes before her son can see. 

“Your father. . . ” she looks up at the boy, “is truly dead to us now.”

​

The two sit mournfully on the grass.

​

Then she rises. “Come. Help me gather firewood.”

​

In the silence of the mountain trees, she and the boy find brittle pines and snap off their branches, the crackle echoing in the quiet altitude. They pile the branches atop his body and set him ablaze. A blade of grass catches fire, and then another. We scuttle out of the mountain as it erupts in smoke, rising into the sky along with the ashes of the man. The woman breathes in the stench as it suffuses the mountain, and we hear her mutter:

​

“If I can’t have him, neither can you.”

​

But we’re a wily sort, and we’ll find another absent man to eat. The key is to seek out those who won’t be missed.