Living Always, Always Dying

The weightless door squeezed out the sunlight as it silently closed behind her and blended into the baby blue walls. The blue engulfed everything in the room except for the brown oak door that led to the doctor. The entire room was angled toward the door: the chairs, the table, the magazines on top of it, and even, it seemed, the slope of the walls.

The room is void of people. A small head behind a glass in the wall hangs down; it doesn't look up. Robin recites her name. A voice tells her to have a seat. She was watching the head, but the voice came from someplace else. She listened, but heard only the metal speaker in the ceiling. It droned out a crackled saxophone and a monotonous drum beat: she looked up at it. It looked like an air vent. She tasted the recycled air: it was heavy.

She sat in one of the chairs that were attached to the wall. With a useless shifting search for comfort she settled resting forward with her elbows on her knees and her palms against her chin. A small television, perched in the far corner of the ceiling where the entrance door had been , is on. There is no volume but the close captioning is scrolling along. An old black and white movie is playing, she recognizes it: it is about a man who switches heads with a fly. She is not interested.

At the top of the room, directly opposite to the wall with the brown oak door, a large round fish bowl protrudes from the wall, like a bubble. The clear fluid and the movement from inside the fish tank darkens the waiting room. She grows calm watching the fish. The walls around her seem to expand out from the fish tank as it grows smaller in her eyes and farther away; yet the fish inside grow larger.

The width of the room grows thin again and she feels captured and tiny: as if in a shoe box. A clown fish swims up against the glass: prodding it's gray eye at Robin. Jerking around it looks over her whole body and then swims abruptly away.

She too turns away from the bowl and back toward the room. Scanning the room she pauses on the brown door and then on the office glass. The head behind it still remains lowered. She searches along the wallpaper and down across the industrial blue rug, but all she can bear to focus her attention on is a small spider sitting in its web canopied between her chair and the walls.

The spider sits in the center of the web plucking at the filaments with its two front legs: sometimes slow and sometimes quick. To her, it looks like a little harpist playing the filaments into a beautiful song; a song only audible to insects as it sits there silently waiting like a siren for the wreckage. The unwary insect, mesmerized by the beauty of the vibrations, will fly into the net. The spider will launch out in fast forward onto the webbed bug and will spin it all around into a sac of webbing and then retreat back to the center of the web where it will let the womb-like sac percolate. This will keep the insect alive and warm until the spider is hungry. The spider will then sidle up next to it and sink in its needle-like fangs and with its eyes spinning suck out the hopeless life.

Then, she thinks, perhaps this spider is different. Perhaps it's playing the filaments rough, like a guitar, to make them visible. Robin pretends she can hear the song. It's a sad song: regrets for existing as a little monster, living to murder and murdering to live. IF an insect still gets caught, despite these vibrations, the spider will justify it as survival, as natural selection. It will spin the bug around and return to the center. As the womb-like sac prolongs the insects life the insect will scream, and the spider, unable to stand the guilt, will kill it. It will stick in its fangs, survive, and crawl back to the center of the web to play again its sad, sad song.

As Robin contemplates squishing this spider the music from the metal speaker scratches of and blares a robotic "Robin Dominguez: Room A" and scratches back to the sax. She stands up mechanically and, avoiding the fish, steps head lowered toward the heavy brown door. Her right hand lies across her stomach; she glances at the TV and notes the human-headed fly stuck in a spider's web crying inaudibly "Help me! Help me!". She turns her head away and reaches out her right hand for the handle on the heavy brown door.