Spider Web Season
By: Kurt Reno
Tags: Short Story, Trees, Short Fiction

Parker was walking through his old neighborhood. He hadn’t been there since he was a kid. He was trying to remember all the shortcuts and secret corners and places you could stand in the rain and not get wet. There were a lot of them. Most of the houses there backed onto a long, irregular, wooded plot with a small creek that snaked its way through the area. When he was a kid, this space connected the nearby houses much more effectively than the actual streets. On a map, it really did look a little like a snake. But at ground level, to a kid, it was the fastest way to his friends’ houses, a place to see Raccoons and Crayfish, to play Ghost in the Graveyard. To climb trees, to pretend you were a lone survivor. To hide and watch older kids smoking, maybe drinking. Maybe more. To escape when your parents were fighting. To pretend you were happy. And to really be happy, sometimes. It was all those things.

The trees were bigger now than when he lived here. In the wider neighborhood, some of the houses had been redone, but were still recognizable. Some had been knocked down completely, replaced by bigger, flashier architecture. Some of the roads had been widened, some of the intersections now had traffic lights, where before they had stop signs. But the snaky section behind all the houses right here was intact, basically the same.

In the Summer, like it was now, the trees were so full with wide, green leaves, that it was quite dark at ground level. It was also hot and humid. It was also spider web season. Always in shade, you really had to be extra careful for spider webs across the main path, and especially the smaller paths off that. They were hard to see, unless a ray of sunshine somehow pierced the leafy canopy and made it all the way down to the ground. A spider web lit that way was a striking thing.

Parker found one of the paths he was looking for. It was still visible, but less well-worn than he remembered. There were fewer kids living in the neighborhood now, Parker thought, so that might explain it. He followed it til it widened out at the base of three very tall pine trees. His eyes followed the biggest tree up into the canopy. It was already big when he was a kid and climbed it. Now it was, well, a dozen or so years bigger. The lower branches were pretty much gone, and the notches they left were how you climbed up the first ten feet or so.

Parker remembered the fun of climbing this tree. The branches were thick and sturdy, even close to the top. It was a great place to hang out and scan the neighborhood. He took a few steps towards it, then stopped. He saw the patches of thick, sticky sap, and remembered.

That’s right, he thought. This can get pretty messy.

He looked down at his newer, nicer clothes, and remembered that sap stains are hard to wash out. There was a good chance they’d be permanent. He had to decide.

It’s okay, he thought finally. It’ll be like a souvenir. My last climb.

He looked around to make sure he was alone, reached up for the first notch where a branch used to be, and started to climb. In no time he was almost halfway up, at least thirty feet off the ground by his reckoning. He was now well above the fences and retaining walls of the houses around that part. He kept climbing, past the tops of the leafy trees. There were only the two other pine trees this high up. The pants he was wearing were black, and his long-sleeve shirt was dark green. So being behind the brushy pine needles, he would have been hard to spot unless someone was looking right at him.

He made it to the arrangement of branches where he used to sit. The tree had grown since then, and he climbed up another ten feet or so to a similar arrangement, which seemed like it would be just as comfortable. It was. He sat, locking his arms around a very decent branch for safety. He stared out at the yards and carports and pools and roofs of his old neighborhood. The view was better than he remembered. Probably because he was higher up. He turned to the other direction, and realized he was able to see right into a window. That wasn’t there before, he thought. He looked around, trying to place the house. He eventually concluded that someone must have knocked down the previous house and built a new one, with at least one extra floor. And bigger windows. It seemed to him it was a bedroom, probably the master bedroom. He looked out at the rest of the neighborhood to see if there were any other new taller houses he had missed. There weren’t any. Not this tall, anyway. Then he looked at the nearby branches, and at his clothes, to determine how visible he himself was at that moment. He already saw some sap stains, and grinned a resigned grin. Realizing it wouldn’t take much to be spotted, he decided it would be a good time to climb down.

As he was turning to head down, he glanced at the window again, and saw that there was someone in the room now. It was a woman, maybe right around his own age.

He froze. In an instant, his heart beat so hard he was sure it was making a loud noise, and his hands became sweaty. Perfect for grabbing onto sap-covered branches seventy feet in the air, he thought. He wanted to start down, but he knew if he moved at all, the woman in the bedroom would notice him. So he stared, waiting for her to leave the room, or at least the window line of sight, so he could escape. But she just sat on the bed, looking at something she held in her hands.

Parker’s eyes were pretty good, but she was far away, so he couldn’t be sure, but it looked like she was crying. Her head bobbed a little, as if she was sobbing. She brought one hand up to wipe her eyes. Then she brought her other hand up to cover her whole face. But she was still holding the something in that hand. He tried to focus on what it was.

Holy crap! he thought. Is that a gun?

Not worried about becoming noticeable, he swung to the far side of the trunk, and started down the tree. Sweaty, sappy palms and all. About halfway down, adrenaline, sweat, and hurry conspired to make him take a branch too fast, and he slipped. He fell down one set of branches. He was able to grab a branch with his whole right arm and keep from falling. At the same time, his left leg caught on a dead branch, which ripped his pants and cut his leg just above the knee. It was a deep cut, and it hurt. It started bleeding right away. He looked around, and saw he was still about fifty feet up in the tree, but already inside the leafy canopy.

Good, he thought. Hidden.

He tried to calm a little, and worked his way down from branch to branch. He heard a car pull up, and the engine turn off, and figured he must be near the tall house’s driveway. He heard the car door open, then slam shut, and footsteps on pavement. Through the leaves, he looked to where the sound was coming from. He saw a man, also about his age, walk to the side door, open it, step into the house, and slam the door shut.

Oh, now what? he thought. He didn’t want there to be a shooting. And he really didn’t want to be witness to a shooting, from a tree, looking into their windows. He imagined a future a half hour from now, talking to someone official.

What was he doing in that tree? What could he tell them? He wasn’t twelve anymore. He was twenty-eight. What the hell was a twenty-eight-year-old man doing way up in a tree looking in someone’s window? Climbing for fun? With a wounded leg and torn, bloody clothes? Running through the woods after a shooting? Come on.

He made it to the ground and started along the path back towards his car. If there was such a thing as a fast limp, that’s what he was doing. Without stopping, he looked down at his bleeding leg. He looked back at the tall house to listen for yelling, a fight, a shot. Nothing that he could hear. He frowned, and faced forward again. Just then, he caught the glint of sunlight on a spider web, not one foot from his eyes. He stopped and bounced a few half steps backwards.

Of course, he thought. It’s still spider web season. That’s all I need. It’d be right on my face if I’d been running. That’s all I need.

He looked closely. There was a big green spider right in the middle of the web. It was scary. Need to be careful, he thought. Need to look closely where I’m going. He looked at the spider. It rotated about a quarter turn, centered exactly in the middle of its web, like an old TV dial or the knob on a gas stove. It happened to turn in the direction of the path he needed to take. He slow limped all the way back to his car.

Parker never heard a shot, never saw any police. He got into his car before anyone could see his torn pants and bloody leg. Maybe it wasn’t even a gun, he thought. Maybe it was just a phone, or a bracelet, or a dual-photo frame. Maybe it was a small jewelry box, or a cat’s toy, or a dried rose. There’s a lot of things that might make a perfectly happy, perfectly sane woman cry, he thought, as he drove out of his old neighborhood for the last time.