Arachnophobia

for Danah

That spiders fall like stars on strings from trees and ceilings of garages, scares the shit out of my tough little sister, a chemist with a PhD who got a pistol from her husband for her twenty-sixth birthday. My little sister, who played in darts tournaments with mustached gay cowboys at the Round Up on Thursdays, and "whipped their asses," who used to hunt deer with our father and race motorcycles with her boyfriends. She sees spiders now when she closes her eyes. She doesn’t sleep at night. She stays inside and dusts the closets. She won’t sit down until she pounds the cushions on the couch. She shakes out her throw blanket and pulls her legs beneath her lap – the way a spider folds its legs when it’s about to pounce. My little sister is ready to jump out of her skin. My little sister thinks spiders sense her fear and are drawn to it, spiders who thought her up. So she won’t garden; her cats have allergies; she has six exterminators on rotation. My little sister is afraid one exterminator will find out about another, at a convention or an expo. Her husband doesn’t even know because she uses her own money. But his head aches behind his eyes when he gets home. He thinks it’s her.

*Chip Livingston's poetry is forthcoming in Bloom, Best New Poets 2005, and The New York Quarterly; his poetry and fiction have appeared recently in McSweeney's Internet Tendencies; Eleven Eleven; Barrow Street; New American Writing; Cimarron, Brooklyn and Apalachee Reviews; Rosebud; Crazyhorse; Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe; and Velvet Heat. He lives in New York City.