The Spider in My Eye

By Donald Carrick

The spider in my eye is not a cruel thing, she does not hate me. It is important that I remember this. It feels sometimes, indeed when things started it felt all the time, as if this is personal, done out of resentment or as punishment for some slight or crime against her or perhaps against some old arachnid god who sent her for me. But that is not the case because the spider in my eye does not hate or punish, she feels no cruelty, she is just a spider after all.

She has long, thin legs like double-jointed chains of taped together matchsticks, mottled black and a dark, sickly brown. They don’t come out too often but it hurts when they do. At first I feel a sort of crinkled, itchy feeling between my skull socket and the top of my eye, I can’t scratch because the bone is in the way, this goes on for minutes at a time, it’s as if she is giving me warning. Then, slowly comes the pressure and the pain all in a single line as the legs come out, squeezing under the eyelid clumped together before uncurling into individual limbs. Normally there’s only three or four legs, she uses them to grip the front of my eye for purchase as she shifts and shuffles and scrambles, adjusting her position on the other side. The legs clinging to the front of my eye feel like rippling razor cuts but the sensation of her shifting purchase across the top of the optic nerve is excruciating beyond description. When she is done and she slithers her legs back under my eyelids I normally just sit down, carefully and slowly, and cry for an hour or so or the floor, maybe a chair if there happens to be one nearby. 

For obvious reasons I don’t wear contact lenses anymore.

Once, after the first few times her legs came out I tried to pull her out by them. I waited until they had unfurled and extended out, staring horrified into the mirror I could see where the thin red-tinged skin of the lid was clinging around each of those awful match-stick pieces of her. I grabbed up suddenly, pinching her legs between the tips of my fingers and began to pull, I pulled as hard as I possibly could, I swear. I don’t really remember what happened next, I know I must have passed out from the pain, I woke up on the floor, my vision was blurred and half my face was blooded.

Later I asked the doctors what had happened and they told me “She bit you. She bit you there on the back of your eye. It must have been very painful, no wonder you passed out.”

I asked them what she was doing, why she never left, what she kept moving around for.

“Well” they said “We think she’s making a nest, spinning webs, looking for somewhere to lay her eggs.”

The thought of it. Eggs. Oh God. Children. A little swarm of them crawling all over the back of my eye. Maybe they’d wander off, they’d be smaller than her, maybe they’d crawl down my throat or into my lungs or along the underside of my brain. It was all I could do not to throw up then and there. Luckily I had the stomach to make it to the little white bathroom first. 

I cried for a lot longer than an hour after that. I sat on the cold tiles next to the bowl, clutching my legs close to my chest, my skull pounding and the smell of my own sick filling the air. I was there a very long time, but eventually I got up. I knew what I needed to do. 

Clutching the knife in one hand I stared at myself in my mirror. The doctors had clean the blood off my face but there was still a stain near my foot where some had got on the carpet and my eye was puffy, bloodshot and red. Maybe it was my imagination but I think I felt the slightest twitch back there when I moved the knife closer, like she knew what was coming. I’d sharpened the blade for a good twenty minutes beforehand and the steel point was as sharp as it was ever going to get as I pushed it, trembling and slow, against the skin below my eye and saw the blood start to spurt and run down the blade, bright and alive. I stopped. I took a few sharp breathes, desperately trying to will myself on but I just… I just couldn’t do it. I had to keep my eye. Even with her there I had to keep my eye. So here we are. 

After all that, after the incident with the knife, I asked the doctors again why they’d put her there in the first place and at least this time they gave me an answer – “We wanted to see” they said “To see what you’d do, to see what she’d do. It’s all so very interesting.”

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DONALD CARRICK is a writer and public speaker from Glasgow, Scotland and he is currently based out of the city of Edinburgh. He has previously worked on Man Made Origin's Tales of the Verse and has written several episodes of Mariah Avix's 600 Second Saga.

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