Short Stories

Marisol took the room without reading the lease, which is how she ended up above the attic window. Something had been living there, patient with glass and dust. She found the webs in March and the tenant in April, and neither of them ever moved... The room came with a gable window and a landlord who said there was nothing above her. She read the lease quickly, as she reads everything, and signed where the line was.

The webs came first, in March. She found them while wiping the window, a grey sheet in the upper corner, and assumed it was dust that builds a shape when nobody looks. She pulled it down, folded it, and put it in the drawer. Throwing it away felt rude. Keeping it felt practical.

In April she found the tenant, in the corner where the web had been, the size of a thumbnail, the colour of the wall. She stood in the middle of the room and watched it. It did not move. She did not move either. Eventually she sat down on the floor, which is what anybody does when negotiating with something in a corner.

She called the landlord. He asked which window she meant, and said there was no attic. The sentence before that was that the roof was too low to crawl into. She said it was fine. Both were lies, and the second was easier because she had a spider in her room and no way to prove it.

She named it, which is the mistake she blamed herself for. Tenant, because the lease had said the room was hers and nothing about what was above it. By June the window was no longer dusty on the inside, and something had been wiping it from the other side. The lease gave her a month of notice. She read that part in September and stayed.

Mireille counted the spiders before the parcels, because spiders are easier to count. The last had a spare leg tied off with a red thread, and it rode where others would not. The parcel had no address, only a name, and the name was hers... She was a courier for a depot with no name on the door, and she had done the work for six years because the spiders came free.

They loaded the vans, rode on the roof racks, and sorted the sacks by weight. Mireille counted them the way other people counted stock. Seven legs was normal for the big ones. Six was a spinner. Six plus a spare tied off in red thread was something else.

The one with the spare rode inside her jacket, against her ribs. The others sat on the roof rack in the rain, cheerful about it. It came in at the loading door, stayed the whole run, and by the end had tied the red thread into a knot around the paper. The parcel had no address. It had a name, written twice in a small careful hand, and the name was hers.

She wrote nothing on the sheet, took it home, and opened it at the kitchen table with a bread knife. Inside were seven lengths of cut red thread and a note in the same hand. The note said the spider would need the spare, that it was a loan, and that she should be careful with the eye it had lost. Then it thanked her for six months of sun on the roof.

She never found out who sent it. The depot said there was no parcel. She never told the spiders, which she later recorded as the only professional mistake of her career. The one with the spare sits in the kitchen drawer now, the red thread knotted around nothing, and nobody has asked her why.

The house had been quiet for eleven years, until nobody mentioned it. Marta kept mentioning it. On the ninth of the month she put her ear to the boards and heard a slow sound, like paper folded in another room, and did not go down... She had bought the house for the quiet, which is the sort of reason that turns into a problem by the second year.

The quiet was the point. Marta had lived above a railway, then a workshop, then a family that argued at the table, and wanted a house where the loudest thing was the fridge. The agent said the previous owner had complained about the noise and asked for a reduction. She said yes and meant it.

She was the only one who mentioned it. Her sister said the house was peaceful. Her neighbour said she had never noticed anything. The man who looked at the boiler said the house was solid and that you could hear the rain in it, which she decided was the politest thing said about it.

On the ninth of the month she put her ear to the boards and heard it again, the slow sound, under the floor, patient enough to wait for her to stop breathing before it started. There was a cellar hatch in the kitchen, under a rug bought to hide it, painted shut.

In the end she did not go down. She took the hatch up instead and found a room the size of a wardrobe. It was dry and empty and swept. There was dust in the corners and none on the floorboards in the middle, in a rectangle, the size of a person lying down. She sold the house in the spring. The sound stopped with it, which is the part she minds. On the ninth of every month she still lies down and listens, and it is never there.