The Widow

Writer's Note: This is an updated story which was previously published on Vocal.

Sunday, April 12, 2020

As the afternoon sun began its journey towards the horizon, hidden by the onset of a storm beginning to settle across a small part of the eastern Missouri countryside. As such, rain started falling on a two-story house surrounded by trees and fields. The lady who owned the house, a young woman scarred both emotionally and physically, loved the quiet solidarity. She loved living with the her closest friends, who weren't around at the moment.

Kate Parker sat quietly in her large Missouri home’s kitchen, soaking in the endless boredom that had begun to settle into her mind as she stared down a glass of orange juice that was left on the table from earlier that day. This was one of the first times she’d been alone in a while, as her friends and occasional roommates Jacob Riley and Alexandria Matthews had business back elsewhere and wouldn’t be back until the next day.

With nothing else seeming to entertain her, the young woman simply stared at the glass, the sides of which began to show evidence of the former cool state of the glass as beads of water dripped down the side and onto her old pinewood table. The same table had seen its fair share of birthdays, as well as tears of sorrow, some were .

It had been nearly three years since the last day she saw her husband and son, and it was coming up on that particular day's anniversary within the next week. Content with her day as it was, the young woman continued to sit at the table, staring down the glass of what used to be cold orange juice.

Despite having her two best friends around frequently, every new day still seemed like an ordeal to Kate, especially lately. Getting out of bed, cooking herself breakfast, driving to town to get supplies for the coming winter months, and especially going out every other day to harvest fruits and vegetables that she had been growing on her farm since she and her husband Andrew moved into the quaint two-story house.

She remembered doing this with her Andrew and their young son Elias, but also remembered when a car accident took that away from her. Occasionally she would find herself waking up and smiling, only to see an empty pillow next to her. Other times she would prepare a dinner for three, hoping that the horrific accident that took them was only an awfully bad dream. Kate at all times wanted to think that Andrew was still at work, and he would be on his way home with their son. But then, realization would settle in and she would stop, fall to her knees, and break down into a teary-eyed hysteria. If this was a dream, then the memory of their funeral alone would be enough to jar her awake.

She poured the orange juice down the kitchen sink, washing the glass out and putting it on the counter to dry. She almost dropped it, however, when she saw something small and black stuck to an old roach trap on her kitchen counter. Kate never had a fear of anything except for tornadoes, so the last possible thing she was afraid of was a little baby spider. Upon closer inspection, however, she realized that this spider was a small, dangerous one – a black widow. While the poor creature tried to break herself free of the trap, Kate noticed that one of her legs was stuck deep into it. Putting on her thick winter gloves, Kate grabbed a pair of tweezers from a first-aid kit and gently lifted the black widow off the trap, but her stuck leg was damaged far too much, and broke off when she pulled.

Aside from roaches, Kate never liked killing insects or arachnids or anything of the like, and the thought of this poor little baby spider losing its leg surprisingly saddened her a bit. Carefully, she carried the spider out the door leading to her patio and looked out at her yard. The light drizzle from earlier that day had, in the past hour or so, become a torrential downpour, which she hadn’t noticed while staring blankly at the orange juice. She realized that the little spider could get caught in a stream and drown if she put her in the yard, so Kate simply dropped the seven-legged spider on the deck and watched her run down the wooden planks.

Having done her “heroic duty” for the day, Kate sat on her living room couch and watched television for an hour, flipping between mysteries, alien-invasion science fiction films, and character dramas. Getting on the computer did not help her growing ennui, as she never really got into the chat or social websites aside from streaming site ViewMe. Something intrigued the woman, however, and she typed “BLACK WIDOW” into the search bar. After a short search, she found all the information she needed involving specific black widows that lived in the Midwestern United States, and Missouri in particular. Kate turned off the computer and found herself staring at a clock which said 7:03 PM.

“Well, it's as good as any time,” she said to herself. Kate opened her refrigerator, revealing a rather large bottle of Whiskey that was well over half empty on the middle shelf. Next to the sink, there were about a half-dozen empty bottles of the same alcoholic beverage. Rather than using a glass, Kate popped the top off the bottle and leaned back take a drink from the bottle, but the sudden appearance of another black widow in front of her eyes, hanging from a strand of web, startled the girl so much her hands opened wide, and the bottle of Whiskey fell five feet to the floor and exploded into hundreds of pieces.

“Dammit!” she said, looking up to see the black widow as it crawled up the web towards the ceiling. “You know, that was my last damn bottle, and I can’t buy any more !” At this point, however, she wasn't sure if she was talking to the spider or herself. Kate looked up at the spider as it hung on the web, and then she grabbed a piece of paper and a cup to capture the widow and put it back outside like the other one.

“You are lucky I'm sparing you like I did... your... wait a minute.” Kate counted the legs of the black widow: seven. This was the same spider she saved earlier. “What are the odds,” she asked herself, “I must have a crack in my door frame or something.” Kate took the spider over to the door and opened it, but the rain was still pouring outside.

“Okay, I'll... I don't know... put you in a container tonight, but tomorrow I'm taking you out to the damn yard.” Kate grabbed an old food container which was collecting dust in the back of her kitchen cabinet and punched holes in the lid with a knife, she then put on some gloves and carefully grabbed the glass which held the spider, and placed it into the object, simultaneously removing the glass and closing the lid before it could get out. With that done, Kate sat the box on the cabinet and turned the light off as she left the small kitchen and went upstairs to her bedroom, forgetting about the mess on the floor.

Sitting down on the white-covered bed and turning on a black desk lamp on her end table, Kate grabbed a large, leather-bound book from the end table's middle shelf. She breathed in heavily as she opened the book, as she did every night. To her, reliving her old memories through the scrapbook was a ritual, usually after drinking. Since that black widow stopped her from drinking tonight, she had a different, renewed sense of nostalgia. In the cellophane-wrapped pages of the old scrapbook, she looked at wedding pictures of herself and then-new husband Andrew, both smiling brightly, she in a white dress and he in a black tux both standing under a brilliantly white wedding arch. Other pictures were of them kissing and sharing cake. Kate flipped the page, smiling, and saw more pictures of them together, smiling at the camera as the brilliant blue ocean by the Florida Keys, the destination for their honeymoon, expanded out infinitely behind them. Kate turned the pages and looked at the pictures they took of each other, together and separate, and with their son Eli when he was born. She went through four years’ worth of photos of the family, then she stopped smiling as she reached the last page in the scrapbook.

Instead of a picture, there was a single news article taken out of a newspaper. The article, “ST. LOUIS ACCIDENT KILLS FATHER, SON” detailed the eye-witness account from her friend Jacob Riley who was there when a mysteriously empty car collided with Andrew’s minivan, killing both him and their son Elias. Kate closed the book, as well as her eyes, as she teared up reading the story of her husband and son's death for what had to have been the hundredth time. Though it was relatively early for her, Kate decided to shut the lamp off and go to sleep for the night.

That night, Kate dreamed of her husband standing beside her as they stood on a mountaintop just before sunset, a cold yet inviting wind blowing through her hair and clothes. Off a short distance, her son Eli was playing with a toy of the St. Louis Gateway Arch, as well as a weird, three-spiked toy spaceship. Andrew gave Kate a warm hug, and she felt completely safe despite being at such a high location. He whispered quietly into her ear, the sound of which she could not hear due to the raging winds. Suddenly, in her dream, she turned and saw a small spider sitting on a rock behind her. Sitting next to the rock was a bottle of her whiskey that the spider was responsible for destroying. As she tried to figure out what this meant, she edged closer to the whiskey and picked it up, pulling the cork out and getting ready to take a drink, but stopped herself when she saw the seven-legged spider.

“Well, aren’t you going to stop me?” Kate asked it, wondering if it could respond in her dream, “I mean, you stopped me from drinking before, was that a sign?” The spider stayed quietly on the rock, looking at Kate. It didn't respond, as expected, but Kate sat the bottle on the ground where it was.

Kate walked back over to her husband and son and watched the sun set with them, one of their favorite things to do when the two were alive. She turned around and the spider was gone, and the only thing that gave her any evidence the thing was there being a written into a web. At first, Kate thought that the black widow was channeling Charlotte from E.B. White's novel, but closer inspection of the word let her make out the letters “S-A-F-E”. Just as she was about to turn around to find the spider, a flash of green light enveloped her.

Suddenly, a loud noise from downstairs jarred Kate out of her sleep. She quickly ran downstairs and saw a man wearing a ski mask lying on the floor, visibly unable to breathe. Kate quickly ran back upstairs, locked the door to her bedroom, and called the police. Ten minutes later, the police as well as an ambulance arrived outside, and the officers made their way into the house through what turned out to be the busted front door. By the time they got to the burglar, he was dead from an allergic reaction.

An hour had passed and a coroner had arrived from the nearest big city. During this time, two police officers questioned Kate about what she saw, one of which being Derek Peterson, a young man she knew from when they were both children. Kate told them what had happened from her point of view, how she came downstairs after being woken up and saw the criminal on the floor. Derek, looking around, noticed a clear container sitting on the counter and reached towards it.

“Oh, don't touch that, please,” Kate said, “It's got a dangerous spider in it, a black widow. I was going to take it outside tomorrow.”

Derek picked it up to show her. “I don't see a spider in here, ma'am.” To Kate's surprise, there was indeed no sign of a spider in the container. She could still see the air holes, but the spider was long gone.

A short time later, the coroner, as well as Derek and the other police officer, sat down with Kate in her living room. They told her that the man who broke into her house was a fugitive, a convicted murderer who had escaped from a prison in southern Iowa. The coroner made a preliminary field report which said that the murderer had a serious sudden case of anaphylaxis, originating from some type of abrasion on his neck. He then slipped on some spilled whiskey on the floor and hit his head on the cabinet where he died. Kate asked the coroner what caused the abrasion, and he looked at the pictures on his camera.

“It looks like some kind of spider bite, ma'am. Perhaps the man was allergic to spiders in a severe way, and being bitten made him going into anaphylactic shock.” Kate and Derek, who had the conversation about a missing spider earlier in the evening, looked at each other with a puzzled expression.

Afterward, everyone who responded to Kate's police emergency had left, with the sole exception of Derek, who was walking Kate through the house to make sure she was okay. The latter was spending time explaining what had happened, from the spider showing up in the trap to making her drop the whiskey. She mused that, at the end of the night, the alcohol was partially responsible for possibly saving her life.

“So you were saved by a seven-legged spider. Lucky number seven, I guess right?”

Kate laughed. “Yeah, lucky number seven. That's what she was, lucky. She stopped me from drinking Whiskey, and then saved me. Most people have hawks, or polar bears, as their so-called 'guardian spirits', and I was given her to help me.”

“How do you know it's a female,” Derek asked.

Kate smiled and shook her head. “Trust me, it's one widow to another.”

Derek laughed, then walked back to his car, but not before turning around to smile at Kate. “Call us if you need us, Mrs. Parker.” Kate smiled back and watched him drive away, then walked upstairs to go back to sleep after securing her broken living room door. This time, she knew that she was, for all intents and purposes, “SAFE”.

About the Author:

N.J. Folsom is an introverted writer based in Missouri. In his free time, he likes to play video games and draw. If you like the story and felt it was worth your time, please consider donating to his PayPal so he can write more!

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