At night, Olivia becomes a spider. She scurries down San Francisco streets, floats gently between cotton-candy-colored houses, and hides behind signs for trendy restaurants, like Trough and Instance.

By day, she works as a software engineer for a company that rents out kitchenware and other home goods. In her spare time, she edits a periodical called Non-Random Number Generator, which showcases the poetry of local writers, but only if the poems involve the number ninety-nine. They get a surprising amount of submissions.

It’s the night that’s tricky. She lopes eight-legged, her steps tapping out a metrical line. Spondee, spondee, spondee.

The city is no place for a spider.

At a taco party in a new restaurant in the Mission, Olivia contemplates the problem of her nocturnal transformations.

“Are you okay?” asks Stanley. “You’ve been kind of quiet.”

One of Stanley’s friends has rented out the back room of the restaurant for a birthday party. Tables with austere bowls of salsa and tortilla chips line the walls, but no one is sitting down. There must be fifty people milling about. Olivia feels underdressed in her jeans and purple hoodie.

Olivia and Stanley have been dating for two months, but Olivia feels things are not quite working out. There isn’t anything wrong with their relationship. Stanley is considerate and smart, an outdoorsy programmer who loves pho. They see each other three times a week, hiking in the hills, eating brunch (eggs Benedict for him, waffles for her), watching horror movies while soaking in the enormous claw-foot tub nestled in his apartment. They’ve never had a fight. But the relationship is, somehow, lackluster. Olivia finds the lack of books in Stanley’s apartment disconcerting. (She knows this is unfair.) Also, he has an annoying habit of flossing in the living room. Maybe the real problem is that they only talk about programming, about work stuff, because what else are they going to say to each other?

“I’m fine. Just hungry,” says Olivia.

While walking to the fancy taco bar squished into the back of the room, she is introduced to seven people, and she feels obligated to smile each time. Eventually, she acquires a pumpkin and pork taco. It is delicious, with just the right amount of sour cream.

After, Olivia spends the night at Stanley’s place.

While Stanley is asleep, Olivia turns into a spider.

She scurries along a bookshelf full of IKEA decorations, everything large and distorted and in new colors, seen through her spider eyes. Her body feels light, as if she could float up and outward.

Olivia ends up in the claw-foot tub. Its curves are monstrous.

She wonders what will happen if Stanley wakes up and squishes her. In the morning, will her body transmute into that of a mangled woman, limbs crushed, blood seeping? It seems to her that people are obsessed with wounds on women’s bodies. A prurient curiosity pushes people to ask, “What really happened?” They want the dark motivations, the details heaped upon each other like so many disembodied limbs. Did those women ever get to choose what others were told?

If she is squished, people will say, “The boyfriend did it.” It’s always the significant other. Reporters will question Stanley, wanting every detail. “How did you crush her?” they will ask. “By what implement? How did you manage to make her limbs so perfectly flat?” From her place in the tub, Olivia will not be able to say a thing.

If she is dead, will she still turn into a spider at night?

The morning arrives, and Olivia is in the tub, her human limbs hanging over the sides.

Olivia waits until they’ve eaten breakfast before she breaks up with Stanley. He is surprisingly angry.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he keeps saying. He paces the apartment, all nervous energy. Olivia feels bad, but she also knows she doesn’t love Stanley, and she probably never will. She can’t imagine telling him about turning into a spider.

“You’ll find someone else,” she says, gently.

As she leaves his apartment for the last time, the wind whispers past, bringing in the fog.

At work, Olivia is distracted. She finds herself researching spiders when she should be coding. She learns some spiders are social, creating massive webs together. The female spiders will guard their egg sacs as a team, a horde of warriors.

It occurs to Olivia, in one embarrassing moment, that she does not even know which species of spider she transforms into.

Some spiders can be identified by the webs they make, but Olivia has never tried to make a web.

Because of an error in her code, three planetary mixers get shipped to the wrong address. Her manager is not pleased. Olivia spends a breathless two hours hunting down the bug, downing a cup of black tea without even realizing it’s in her hand. Normally, she enjoys her job, but recently she’s been making simple mistakes, which is disconcerting.

Every year, she has an existential crisis, which she cannot bring herself to take too seriously, but which often revolves around her work. Is the best use of her brief time on Earth really to make sure mixers get delivered to the correct place? Shouldn’t she have a productive and healthy hobby, like cross-country biking? (She spends a lot of time knitting sweaters while watching baking shows, even though she rarely bakes.) She could be making something useful in her spare time. Perhaps vegetables or tables. Homegrown, organic vegetables to put on her sturdy yet elegant oak table. At least she has her magazine, Non-Random Number Generator, which staves off some of these feelings of inadequacy. As always, she comes to the same conclusion, that she is an insignificant human in a world made of beautiful things, and that maybe it’s okay to love baking shows.

Before going home, she learns one last spider fact. Many female spiders are much larger than their male counterparts.

Olivia meets her date outside the Conservatory of Flowers. Sekani is charming and good-looking, with nails painted glittery blue. Olivia spent too much time getting ready, putting on makeup and scrubbing it off again until her face got that raw, red look, which required more makeup to hide. She finally settled on a peach lip gloss and minimal mascara.

Sekani works for a dog-walking company and makes art in his spare time, sculptures from found objects. On his phone, Sekani shows Olivia a picture of one of these sculptures made from discarded taco wrappers. It is surprisingly beautiful, painted to look like a galaxy full of stars.

Olivia pulls out the latest copy of Non-Random Number Generator and flips to her favorite poem, about ninety-nine leaves that fall every year of a woman’s life.

“Did you write this?” asks Sekani.

“Oh, no, no,” says Olivia. “I’m just the editor.”

“Even harder,” says Sekani.

Sekani asks for a copy of the magazine, which he tucks into a beat-up book bag.

Olivia likes the way that Sekani holds himself, easygoing and confident. She likes how Sekani taps his chin when he’s thinking, and how he lets his dreams get so big. “I’d love to see my pieces in museums around the world,” says Sekani. “The Guggenheim, MOMA, the Stedelijk.”

Olivia is hyperaware of Sekani’s every word, every movement. There is so much laughter that Olivia feels light. They talk for an hour before even entering the Conservatory of Flowers.

The inside of the conservatory is heavy with humidity. Ancient skylights framed in white let in the sun. Plants of all shapes and sizes bloom. Despite the name, there aren’t all that many flowers. Instead, huge leaves and other greenery dominate the rooms.

Olivia tries to pay attention to Sekani, who is looking at each plant with open wonder and curiosity. She tries to read the species names. No matter how hard she concentrates, her mind turns to arachnoid thoughts. The Conservatory of Flowers must be an amazing place for spiders.

In the room with the giant water lilies, Sekani tentatively reaches out for Olivia’s hand. His hand is warm and dry. So close to him, Olivia can smell Sekani’s lavender shampoo. She wants to tangle her arms around his waist like the creeping vines twining all around them.

Sekani’s phone buzzes. The case is mottled like ancient stained glass. He grabs it with his free hand, his other hand still firmly in Olivia’s. His eyes widen.

“Crud, I have to go.” Sekani has a dog-walking appointment on the other side of the city. Olivia is charmed by Sekani’s use of “crud,” spoken with the vim of a harsher swear.

She hugs Sekani, her heart jumping, then watches as he hurries out the door.

Once Sekani is gone, Olivia stares at the giant water lilies. Underneath are hundreds of spines, some hidden underwater. They remind her of spider legs.

Olivia first turned into a spider when she was sixteen. She cowered, alone, surrounded by distorted objects, quivering through the ceaseless night. Her world had become only this—a shaft of moonlight, an edge of fear. She couldn’t understand what was happening; she thought it might never stop.

When it ended, the dawn seeping under her rainbow curtains, she promised herself it would never happen again. She buried the experience under every possible reassurance, tried her best to forget.

She turned into a spider again when she was eighteen, her first week of college. And again at twenty. Each time, she pretended it was happening to someone else.

Now, she transforms into a spider every night, and she can’t ignore it anymore.

Olivia walks to her favorite bakery, humming under her breath in time with the noise of the city. She buys two chocolate croissants, one for her and one for Sekani. They’ve had ten dates so far, the last one picnicking in Golden Gate Park with cheese and green olives and a for-serious checkered blanket. Olivia has come to rely on hearing Sekani’s laugh. It’s like her whole life is tied up in that laugh, like the sky opens up for her and that laugh rains down on her and everything is okay, it’s okay.

The first time Olivia slept over at Sekani’s house, she, of course, turned into a spider. She woke up on the kitchen floor, human again, with Sekani standing over her.

“Breakfast?” asked Olivia, smiling and pulling out a frying pan from a lower cabinet, as if it was a punchline to a joke she’d forgotten to tell. It was clear Olivia had been sleeping on the floor, but Sekani hadn’t pushed her for answers.

One day, Olivia will tell Sekani about her transformations, and she will say, “Watch me in the night. It’s almost like I disappear.”

She has no clue when the appropriate time to tell Sekani will be. It’s not like there’s advice for this sort of thing. Please, Google, she thinks, tell me how many months you should date before you reveal to your boyfriend that you spontaneously turn into a spider.

It is on a weekend trip to Monterey that Olivia decides she will not turn into a spider. Sekani and Olivia have seen the amazing aquarium, one of the best in the world, with sharks, otters, all manner of colorful fish, and a touch pool of rays that may glide under your fingers if you just stay still enough, their slick bodies like nothing Olivia has ever felt before. They have walked along the old canning rows where a ghostly smell of fish still lingers and dipped their feet in the ocean.

In the Airbnb, Olivia nestles next to Sekani in bed, waiting to fall asleep. She will not turn into a spider, she vows. This trip has been wonderful, and she will not spoil it.

Of course, the strange forces that control her body don’t care about Olivia’s desires. In darkness, she awakens with eight legs, her human heart replaced with a tube-shaped spider one.

She wonders, as she scurries under a table, why this keeps happening. What has brought on this unique suffering, what wrongness inside her?

Maybe it wouldn’t be so unbearable if there was anyone else like her, if she didn’t have to endure this alone.

Olivia tries all the things. She contacts an arachnologist to subtly ask how one stops turning into a spider, but her questions are a mix of the oddly specific and maddeningly cryptic, and soon the arachnologist stops replying to her increasingly desperate emails.

She spends hours doing fruitless internet searches, until she ends up on a website about spiders and spells. Feeling ridiculous, she buys three bulbs of garlic and orders an amethyst online. Using her spaghetti pot in lieu of a cauldron, she waits until the brightest time of day and heats everything up. She sets a timer on her phone, feeling like she should instead be using an ancient hourglass or something, feeling like she shouldn’t have tossed in that oregano from the dollar store. She waits for hours, watching the water bubbling, wondering if she’s supposed to feel something.

At the side of her bed, she prays, even though she hasn’t prayed since she was a kid, and she isn’t sure if she still believes in God. Her prayer is mostly an apology. She can’t stop listing everything she’s ever done wrong. She tries to ask for something—forgiveness, a cure, the strength to get through—but she’s out of practice. Her murmurs stop abruptly, and she’s left feeling more alone than before.

She studies spiders at the insect house at the zoo, watching how they move, the shapes they make. Outside of the insect house, there’s a red rope climbing structure shaped like a spiderweb. When she was a kid, she walked up the edge, pretending it was a tightrope, falling again and again, full of joy.

She stops eating gluten. She walks backwards for a day. She cleans out every spiderweb from her house. She tries anything she can think of; it doesn’t have to make sense, she just wants to feel like she’s doing something, like it’s possible she might one day stumble upon the solution.

Everything fails. Of course, it all fails.

Finally, she finds a group run by a woman named Shivali. The group description is oblique, but Olivia knows it’s for women like her, women who turn into spiders. There’s something too familiar about the words, too full of her own experience. Olivia saves the information, even though she knows she’ll never go. What’s the point? If they are still turning into spiders, they haven’t found a cure, either.

Maybe she just isn’t ready to talk about it with anyone.

At night, she curls her spider limbs under her abdomen as tight as they’ll go. She tries to pray again, but then remembers she has no voice.

The real problem with morphing into a spider, it turns out, is the lack of sleep. Spiders can’t even close their eyes.

Every night, Olivia has woken up and roamed (for spider bodies don’t like to stay where they don’t feel safe). Her sleep is disjointed and brief. Some nights, she doesn’t sleep at all.

In the morning, she is groggy and disoriented, twitching limbs that no longer exist.

Impacted by her troubled sleep and the stress of her job, she falls into a depression. She spends more time in bed, and less time with Sekani. Her texts are only strings of emojis, because she can’t be bothered to form actual words, and then they cease entirely.

One day, Sekani knocks on her door.

At first, Olivia doesn’t want to let him in. The apartment is untidy, with plates piled in the sink, her laundry basket overflowing with dirty clothes. Sekani won’t stop knocking. Eventually, Olivia opens the door.

“I wanted to check on you,” says Sekani, moving a stack of magazines to sit down on the couch. Olivia hasn’t returned his texts. She hasn’t seen Sekani all week. Sekani’s face, so impatient at the door, starts to slide into worry.

“I’m fine,” says Olivia, pulling at the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

Sekani sits with Olivia, not saying anything. “You know you can tell me anything, right?”

But Olivia can’t tell him everything. “I haven’t been sleeping well,” she says, which is true. “I’m sorry.” Olivia isn’t sure what she’s apologizing for. Maybe everything. She wants to tell Sekani how much she cares about him, but she’s so tired that she can’t find the words.

Sekani cleans up the dishes and makes Olivia dinner in the tiny kitchen. Nothing fancy, just spaghetti and sauce from a jar. (Sekani eats most of his meals out.) Olivia hasn’t been hungry lately, but she eats anyway.

“What if we go to the beach this weekend?” asks Sekani.

It seems like an impossibly difficult trip, but Olivia agrees.

When Sekani leaves, Olivia watches TV until her eyes burn. If she doesn’t fall asleep, she can’t become a spider. What’s the point of trying to sleep, anyway?

The next morning, she drags herself to work.

It feels like all the important events of her life are happening without her. The Earth keeps rotating, the world keeps going, and she moves with it without having to raise any of her limbs.

When Sekani comes over on Saturday, he’s all bright smiles. They sing along to the radio on the drive to the beach. Olivia rolls down her window, feeling better than she has in a long time. They dip their toes in the ocean and build a sandcastle decorated with seaweed. On the way home, they grab burritos.

But once she’s back in her apartment, alone, Olivia can’t summon up any energy. She wishes she could cry, but she can’t even do that properly. Instead, she stares at a wall, her thoughts a jumbled mush.

She wants her life back, the life where she gets lunch with Sekani on Sundays and kisses him in Golden Gate Park, the one where she reads poetry in the evenings and edits her magazine, the one where she feels something, anything.

That night, when she becomes a spider, Olivia stops and notices. She feels the cool air against her body, the comforting touch of shadows. She smells the musk of her apartment through her legs and pedipalps, the hint of peppermint from her nighttime tea scalding and abrasive. The world looks different through spider eyes. Her vision catches on angles of light and dark. Her bed is not a bed but a wilderness.

Perhaps she must learn to love her spider body.

In her lunch hour at work, Olivia reads submissions for Non-Random Number Generator while eating a bagel with lox and cream cheese. She admires the minimalist nature of the current submission. It is exactly ninety-nine words long.

The poem reminds Olivia of her minimalist lifestyle fantasy. To only own what you need and nothing further.

She has read articles about people who own only one hundred distinct objects. She pictures how many spoons she has. How much underwear. If she was only allowed to have one hundred items, the spoons and the underwear would already be like half her things.

This will never be her life. She can’t give up her hundreds of books, her cute bowls with the pandas painted on, half of a best friends forever necklace from second grade, the terrible holiday sweaters (especially the Halloween one with the singing candy corn). But if she could, wouldn’t she have more control over her life?

She puts down the pile of submissions, tempted to lay her head down for just a moment.

She has been tired. So tired. Behind on everything.

Davor walks into the break room, and Olivia looks up, glad to see him. Davor exudes a certain calmness, with his tweed jackets and grey hair. He is one of those people who everyone instantly likes. Even Denise, who is grumpy about everything from almond milk to public transportation, who on a daily basis throws her shoes at the wall of her cubicle, is fond of Davor.

“What’s that?” he asks, pointing to her pile of submissions. Olivia explains about Non-Random Number Generator.

“No way,” says Davor, delighted. “Malcolm submitted there once, I think. I had no idea that was your project.”

Malcolm is Davor’s husband; they’ve been happily married for twenty-two years. Whenever someone at the office is having a difficult time in the dense forest of despair that is dating, Davor’s relationship is held up as a great talisman of hope. “Maybe you’ll find someone like that,” they’ll say to each other, eyes shining. “Maybe you’ll have a relationship like Davor’s.”

Olivia wants to ask his advice on a number of important topics, laying out her questions like sticks of prayer incense. How do I get my shit together? How does one survive the cataclysm that is love? What makes life meaningful, in a real and true way, in the way where you get up in the morning practically keeling over with purpose? And where do you buy those tweed jackets that never wrinkle? It is impossible to bring up any of this without seeming like a desperate weirdo, so instead she asks about his day.

Basking in the atmosphere of ease that Davor exudes like a mystic aura, Olivia feels better for a few minutes. Back at her desk, she takes a deep breath and gets to work.

The trick to sleeping as a spider, it turns out, is to make a web. Spiders can’t sleep unless they feel safe.

That night, silk builds in her spinnerets, warm and comforting. She weaves her web. Each web is unique, with strange angles and tiny strands glittering like hoarfrost.

At the center of her web, Olivia gains a new, vibrative sense. Every movement is catalogued by her body. Nothing can get close to her without her knowing.

Sleeping as a spider is strange. She cannot close her eyes. She drifts, half aware, legs twitching.

In the morning, she wakes by the side of her bed. Spider silk falls lightly against her elbow, like a kiss.

Now that Olivia can sleep, everything is easier. She stops making so many errors at work. She sees Sekani three times a week. They love to people-watch at museums and walk through the city when the sun comes out. She starts seeing a therapist, who she does not tell about becoming a spider.

It is not enough.

Olivia cannot understand her spider nature. What terrible part of her has caused this nightly metamorphosis? Is there something wrong with her, some monstrous thing that is all her fault?

Olivia often comforts herself by thinking that hard things are part of the human experience, that other people have gone through what she’s gone through and survived, but perhaps becoming a spider is her own special sorrow. There’s Shivali’s group, the one for women like her, but are they really going through the same thing? Would they understand? How can she talk to strangers about her problem if she can’t even tell the people she loves?

“I did not choose this,” she thinks.

Olivia and Sekani are sprawled under stars after a midnight picnic of cheese and pineapple and chocolate croissants from the bakery with the three silver cupcakes on the door. Olivia fits right into the hollow that Sekani’s body makes, as if they are two pieces of the same sculpture, as if an artist created them to curve into each other, just like this.

In the moment before Olivia drifts off to sleep, she jerks herself awake. She can’t sleep here, in this unknown place. What will happen if she undergoes her secret metamorphosis?

“What’s wrong?” asks Sekani, half asleep himself.

Olivia doesn’t mean to tell Sekani the truth. She doesn’t want to ruin the best thing in her life. Uncontrollably, the words come tumbling out, build on each other, wave after wave. She tells of eight twilit legs and shards of light seen through too many eyes; of monstrous wanderings; of loneliness, fear; of losing sleep and dreams and everything; of flying weightless across the sky; of fragile webs and the vibrations she feels even in her waking hours; of disorientation and desire. She speaks until there is nothing left, like a spinneret run dry, her strands spun too tightly to pull them back.

“There’s something wrong with me,” says Olivia. “And I can’t fix it. Nothing I’ve done has fixed it.”

Sekani takes Olivia in his arms, back into the hollow where Olivia fits so well. “Don’t cry,” says Sekani. “The night is too beautiful for that.” Even this Olivia can’t do right. Sekani pulls Olivia to her feet. “Run with me,” he says, and then they are dashing over grassy hills, shadows making secrets of everything.

When they stop, both panting, Sekani smiles. “I just wish you had told me sooner.” Before Olivia can answer, Sekani kisses her, and it is like the sky opens up and the stars become one and beam their light down right on her. “It’s okay,” says Sekani.

“How can you say that? I’m a monster.”

“No,” says Sekani, hardness in his voice. “I have known monsters.”

“It’s this part of me I can’t change, that I never asked for,” says Olivia.

They sit in silence, listening to waves breaking against the bay. Olivia shivers, then settles against Sekani.

“What does it feel like, to make webs?” he asks.

When the sun rises, casting light over the bay like a lighthouse signaling home, Olivia and Sekani stand and stretch. Olivia’s foot has fallen asleep.

“Why did you wait so long to tell me?” asks Sekani. “How long was it before you told your parents, your friends?”

Olivia presses her calf, rubbing life back into it. She laughs in that way one does when trying not to cry. “I haven’t told anyone.”

Gently, he says, “It might help to talk to someone about it. Maybe someone who is going through the same thing.”

On her phone, Olivia pulls up the information on Shivali’s group. Silently, she hands it over.

Sekani brightens. He asks her how many times she’s gone.

She shakes her head. “I can’t.” She doesn’t want to explain the knot in her chest every time she thinks about going, how it feels impossible to speak the words to describe her experience, how she’s kept it locked tight inside her for so long.

Sekani doesn’t push. “They’ll be there when you’re ready,” he says.

Shivali’s group meets at her place on the third Thursday of every month.

When Olivia knocks on the door, unsure what to expect, her breath temporarily leaves her body, but Shivali, an elderly woman with a sleek purple scarf, smiles at her and ushers her in without Olivia having to say a word.

Women of all ages chat over slabs of carrot cake and decaf coffee, spilling themselves onto the mess of pillows and blankets on Shivali’s floor. Shivali introduces her wife, who has a laugh like the soft roar of a timpani.

“You don’t have to spend the night,” says Shivali. “Whatever is comfortable for you. But of course, you are welcome to stay as long as you’d like.”

As night falls, the women settle down, claiming sleeping spots within the nest of pillows and blankets, two people on opposite ends of the couch. Olivia lies down, squishing herself against the wall. She is the last to fall asleep, gazing at the breathing forms of all these women.

When she wakes, it is still dark, and Olivia is a spider. As she scuttles over mountain ranges of blankets, other forms crystallize in her fractured eyes. Other spiders, like her.

Olivia feels the vibrations of her spider sisters, and although they cannot speak, she knows what they would say. You are not alone.

In two years, Olivia will marry Sekani. They will have their ceremony at the Conservatory of Flowers, surrounded by loved ones, both shining with joy. The entire wedding party will ride off on bikes in their fine suits and dresses. Upon return from their honeymoon, Olivia will convince Sekani to live a minimalist lifestyle, which will last three weeks before they give in. It is the blankets that do it. Sekani cannot live without at least ten blankets in the house, in all shades of fuzz. They will grow older together, grow closer, and when Olivia wakes in the morning on the floor in the kitchen, the bathroom, the office, a bit of spider silk stuck to her ankle or tangled in her hair, Sekani will hold her until she stops shivering. Olivia will continue going to Shivali’s house on the third Thursday of every month, making friends among the women there. But that is all in the future, which Olivia has not seen but which sits inside her like a seed waiting for light to bloom.

In Shivali’s house, the spider women build a web, gathering strands like locks of hair, spinning loom-like together, making as one what they could never make apart. They sleep, safe, their spider limbs dreaming, their spider eyes open, their spider bodies resting against strands soft as clouds. Then, as one, they dart out into the night, floating featherlike between buildings, sweeping up the city in their many segmented legs, reaching to each other across the darkness.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: K.T. Elms

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors