spider

Mae pulled a file from a drawer and the clock fell off the wall. She did not know why everything was so heavy, why the weight of this file disturbed the balance in the room. The clock, of its stark and characterless industry, dangled face-to-the-wall by three wires – one red, one black, one white. Mae’s mouth curled down at the ends while a phone clanged in the office next door.

The walls had been moving closer — she’d been feeling the shift for months — and the black squares on the tan-and-black checkerboard floor began to raise almost inperceptibly like teeth. She tripped over them on her way to the shelves, on the way to the desk, on the way to the conference table, on the way to plug in her dying laptop whose battery drained faster than it did a year ago.

A spider crawled out from under the desk, bulbous black body with long slender legs, scrambling symmetrically and without error across the vinyl tiles to the wall. Mae watched the small creature climb straight and then diagonal, like mapping out a crack, to the tall windows, where she paused briefly before slipping through a gap in the frame.

“There is no ceiling,” Mae realized.

Spider said, “Go up.”