Martin is sadistic toward the spiders in the corner. He taunts them with glass jars, with paper towels. He gets them to crawl, slow, cautious, onto the paper and traps them. He breaks the web with his pointer finger. Makes them watch as the bundled fruit flies collapse onto the floor. He twirls the threads around, making his fingertip look like a bug about to get eaten. He lets the spider out. Never kills it, never breaks the whole web.
In three different lifetimes, Martin kills my cat. A palm reader told me so. She lives in the apartment complex across the street. She’s seventy six years old. I can hear her every time she walks, since her gold jewelry clanks and jingles with every step. Every day, she leaves in a Volkswagen handpainted with sparkles, crosses, and the words HANDLING IT: MADAME PALMER, PSYCHIC, MEDIUM, FORTUNE TELLER alongside a phone number on the rear window.
I called her once at two in the morning, when I tried out becoming an insomniac back in June. I was staring out the window at her obnoxiously purple car. I had dropped out of college eight months prior, and a piece of me felt like I was missing out. Not on the education, but the social, conventional, boiler plate parts of it. And I was out of a job, living with Pickles (the cat), Martin, and a girl we found on Craigslist when the rent got tight. I missed having aims. All I did was want.
Madame Palmer picked up after the first ring. She told me to come over right then. Apparently, she could sense my despair through the telephone line. It was urgent, she said. I walked across the street barefoot, in pajamas, and knocked on the door. She let me in through the cascading beads at her doorframe. It smelled exactly how I thought it would: like patchouli and clove cigarettes. She had lit sixteen Virgin Mary candles, and a table in the center had tarot cards laid out preshuffled. She sat me down on a purple plush pillow and told me to hold out my hands.
In the first lifetime, Martin killing my cat is an accident. He leaves the stove on too long and Pickles, my calico angel, doesn’t make it out. She told me this couldn’t happen in this lifetime. In the lifetime Pickles dies in a fire, I didn’t lose my job as a telemarketer. Sometimes, she explained, palms and tarot cards can show the threads that unspooled from the yarn of our lives. Whatever that means.
Before she told me about the next lifetime, she said, “The spirits are saying your roommate is a dick to spiders?”
“Yes,” I replied, still skeptical that balls of yarn could mean something more than the untapped potential of a sweater.
She told me that in the second lifetime, the one where I dropped out of college my sophomore year instead of my junior year, Martin leaves a black widow under a jar. Pickles knocks the jar over and tries to play with the black widow. It bites her. She dies.
In the third lifetime, the one we both graduate, Martin suffers a psychotic break. He gets angry with me and throws a ceramic plate at the wall. He grabs Pickles and a pair of scissors and tries to cut her in two because there’s something evil inside her and he needs to get it out. He makes me watch, like he makes the spiders watch.
I paid Madame Palmer. Walked home and tried to sleep. I dreamt of all the ways Martin could kill my cat, and all the magic spells I could try to bring her back. When I woke up, I drew the curtains to see Madame Palmer standing in the parking lot. She was in her maybe-too-low-cut-for-a-woman-her-age-if-we-can-drop-the-feminism-for-a-second cheetah print dress. She waved at me. I waved back, wondering if her brand of psychic could sense I’d just woken up.
In the living room, our Craigslist roommate was knitting on the couch. Pickles pounced at her yarn ball. It spilled off the couch, flooded the carpet floor. Martin sat with his jar in the corner. Inside, a daddy long legs wept and bent its too long legs at the world outside the glass case– Pickles, the wall, Martin, the yarn– all these things a whole lifetime away.