A reasonable number of spiders?

Sam’s gallery was a narrow 25 feet wide with a wobbly wood-slat floor that ended at a brick wall and two large windows some 70 feet away. In mid-September, the windows posed a delicious dilemma. To leave them shut turned the room into a retreat from the hot and dusty mess of traffic and people in the street. To leave them open, the rumbling hum and drizzle of voices below offered a welcome relief from an overabundance of silence, which could be detrimental to a dealer’s mental health. Forever in a state of uncertainty, he was in the habit of opening and shutting the windows several times a day. His desk, solid oak, an heirloom, was set squarely in front of them. Whenever someone walked into the gallery, he imagined the light pouring in from behind him setting a tone, creating a nimbus glow around his head as he sat at his computer. He wasn’t the sort of dealer to approach a prospective client. He preferred to let them swim up to the desk, where he might scoop them down his throat like a heron. That is, when he was in a fishing mood. After five years of glowing and fishing, those days seemed numbered.

Catherine’s show, How I’m Going to Murder my Mother, was due to open on Saturday, the 15^th. She arrived with her work a few days before to install it. They shared cordial nods and pleasantries before she began to remove rag dolls from their boxes and nail them to the walls. In previous years she had installed two of her own exhibitions. He watched her from behind his desk, trusting she knew what she was doing. Bang, bang, bang. Aside from a phone call toward the end of August to schedule a photographer for the invitation card, they hadn’t spoken since their romantic interlude in her studio. For him, those few minutes had passed in a muffled, closed cocoon, like drifting through a carwash inside a closed car. That she’d spent the time in the carwash glancing over his shoulder at the mannequin dressed as a black widow spider wasn’t lost on him. When she rolled it into the gallery at the end of the day, he stood abruptly, annoyed to see it again. A string of six small black widow spiders accompanied the large one. All had eight long hairy legs and tiny mops of orange hair, like ducks on wheels being pulled by a child.

She arranged the small ones around the large one and introduced them with a flourish of her hand. “Inky Dinky and her Spiders. The main mamma of the show.”

His thoughts turned to nuns, not spiders, huddled together in a conspiratorial conclave in the middle of the gallery. They set a quieter tone from the dolls nailed to the walls, dark and unsettling, as if the main mamma wished to protect her brood from the mayhem breaking out around them. Curiously, they were also easy to shrug off, like passing a Halloween display in a storefront window. “Her babies?” he asked, pointing at the tiny ones.

She scowled. “Sisters.”

Catherine’s mother had not attended her two previous openings. Nor had her sisters. Catherine’s estrangement from family now seemed both sincere and macabre. Hopefully, they would attend this opening and he’d meet them in person.

To view a previous post from the same book go to The difficulty of dreaming properly

To view a synopsis of the book from which this page is taken go to the Books tab at leokamenauthor.com