Calla Bright Inman

There are spiders all around me. All the time, all around me. At night they dangle above my bed. When I sit down to eat lunch, they crawl along the wall next to me. At work they choose my path, blocking the ways I’m not meant to go. Sometimes I tear down their webs, but I know I shouldn’t. As I sit here to write, one hangs in the window. It is waiting. Every woman is a spider. Every woman has a spider inside her. You can twitch and crawl but you’ll never make it far. I can’t call it futile, because in the end, the dewdrops will hang from the silky strands and glisten as the sun rises once more, just as it always has.