Speckled Observations

Catherine Simpson | Issue 2.3

Everyone else saw the spider on Thursday. Well, it wasn’t a spider. Not really. It was a spiderlike speck, clinging to the ceiling tile, and I noticed it on Tuesday.

I know I saw it on Tuesday because there were bagels on the credenza. Cynthia puts them there on Tuesdays, fresh from the administrators’ meeting. Sometimes she leaves the half-empty tub of cream cheese. Sometimes she doesn’t. People forget about the lid, and the knife-scraped ridges along the edges of the container crust over. Cream cheese really shouldn’t be left out at room temperature.

It was Tuesday, and I saw the bagels, and I saw the spider-speck. It was small, then. About the size of a poppy seed. How did I see it, if it was so small? Well, I notice things. I’m very observant. The poppy-seed-spider-speck was on the ceiling tile above Brenda’s desk. This is important: Brenda’s desk is by the emergency exit, the one by the stairs. If there’s a fire and we can’t use the elevator, we’re to use the stairs by Brenda’s desk.

“Brenda,” I said, on Tuesday. “What’s that?” I had five minutes until my next meeting, and I was doing a round. The bagels looked dry.

“What’s what?”

I pointed.

“Oh, that’s been there.”

There’s a Florida-shaped water stain on the speckled tile and on the three surrounding tiles. The tri-tile area. Not what I was referring to. I gestured to her chair. “May I?”

“You may not.”

I returned to my desk, but I remembered the speck.

On Wednesday the spider-speck was still there. It had grown. No longer a poppyseed. Sesame seed size, I’d reckon. Now, this estimate may not be exact. As I was unable to thoroughly examine it, I can’t be as precise as I prefer to be. 

“Brenda.”

“Yes?”

“I’m noticing something different today.”

“It’s the highlights. I’m back on the bleach.”

Her mop looked the same. I edged closer to her swivel chair. She didn’t retreat. Usually, when you get very close to someone, they move.

“I’ve been very busy,” she told me.

Back at my desk, I wrote a brief description of the speck on a sticky note, and then I photographed the note. When the others left for lunch—Cynthia had arranged some sort of catered situation in the conference room—I was able to make a closer examination. Should have been done yesterday, but I do have a life outside of my career, you know.

For the record, all of the ceiling tiles are dabbled with specks of a sort, a byproduct of their aesthetically unfortunate design. Those speck-speckles are uniform, more or less, and they are not what I’m referring to. This spider-speck—my spider-speck—was unusual. Up close, it had jagged little edges. Legs. It wasn’t moving, but it might.

My inspection was curtailed by Brenda’s abrupt return for her Lactaid pills. In my haste to disembark from her office chair, I was unable to photograph the speck, though I did manage to formulate a more precise estimation of its size.

“You’re still worried about that stain?”

I scoffed.

“Well, don’t be. It’s been like that for months. Years, maybe. If the ceiling was going to cave in, it would have by now.”

Faulty logic. I had hoped to return to my perch in her cubicle, but Brenda’s flat stare was relentless. I allowed myself to be shepherded away from the spider-speck towards the cheddar-and-broccoli-scented conference room.

Thursday morning: overnight, the speck had doubled in size. I shifted my morning routine by ten minutes or so in order to arrive at the office prior to my coworkers. Simple but effective. My coworkers have many areas of deficit, but adherence to a regular schedule is not one of them.

Early, I had the office to myself. I mounted Brenda’s chair, careful not to leave evidence of my presence. In fact, I wiped the bottom of my loafers in the hall restroom before attempting to gather intelligence. I’m thoughtful.

Yes, the speck had grown. Now the size of . . . a cumin seed. A caraway seed. No, one of those seeds inside a bell pepper or a jalapeño. Like that, but black and leggy. This time I was ready. I took a photo of the speck, my fingernail hovering next to it for scale. I got down and wrote another note, further chronicling the growth progression.

Now, you may be wondering: is it a speck, or a spider? It’s neither, but you’ll soon see why I refer to it as such.

Thursday, early afternoon. Smoke in the break room: charred popcorn. Alarms blaring, we trudged towards the stairs. Towards Brenda’s desk. Marty shuffled through his key ring, and we shuffled our feet.

“Violating the damn code, locking an emergency exit like that,” Brenda whispered to Rita, the hefty one from accounting. “They make us stand around much longer, I’m telling Becky from HR.”

Brenda is correct. The owner started locking it over the summer, after a series of break-ins by local hooligans. Nothing serious, but enough property damage to warrant a lock. I’ve already filed a report, of course.

Anyway, that’s when everyone noticed the spider.

“Brenda, looks like you’ve got a new roommate.”

That was Bob. He’s in direct sales. Bob pointed, and everyone squinted at the ceiling tile.

“Hope you’re charging him rent.”

One of the girls from the front of the office rolled her eyes. Brenda frowned, her violently coral-colored lips drawing apart. Brenda has small teeth, like a dolphin, and lots of them.

“Disgusting. I think it’s . . . laying an egg?”

I shook my head. Absolutely not.

Before I could speak, eye-rolling office girl cut her off. “It would be an egg sac, but I think it’s just coming down.”

She was correct. The spider-speck had developed a strange, pale protuberance (assumedly what Brenda mistook for an egg), and that protuberance was unfolding, lowering the speck-like spider on her silk. The speck was highly visible, a silhouette against industrial white walls.

Marty got the key, and we paraded out, leaving the spider-speck to the mercy of the squalling smoke detector.

When we returned, it was gone.

“Well, shit. Guess that’s that.” Brenda, only mildly concerned with the possibility of infestation, quickly forgot about the spider. She returned to her desktop without further comment, ignoring my covert investigation. Nothing. All traces, gone.

So, that was Thursday. Speck noticed, misidentified, and forgotten. Friday was much the same. It was Tuesday—we’d had a long weekend, some sort of government-ordained celebration—when it reemerged.

“Oh, gross. It had babies.”

Brenda, it appeared, had grown more observant. The spider-speck had not only reappeared but reappeared in triplicate. More than that, possibly, if the faint gray smear on the ceiling tile was what I thought it was.

This time, the spider-specks had migrated several tiles over, making their home around the glowing plastic exit sign. Brenda and I watched, frowning, as one of the spider-specks bobbed up and down on its silk. On its silk analog, I should say.

“Foul. I’m telling Becky. She’ll get that exterminator.”

The speck slid back towards the tile upon Brenda’s pronouncement. My supervisor entered the room, and I slunk back to my emails. Not forty-five minutes later, I was greeted by a surprise. Brenda sidled up to my desk.

 “They moved.”

My eyes followed the trajectory of Brenda’s pearlescent acrylic nail, raised to point at the convergence of specks nestled in the corner of the tile above my desk. Dozens of leggy, specky jalapeño-seed-sized entities. All above my desk. Breathless, I shook my head in disbelief. Brenda noticed them before I did. An emerging eagle eye, apparently.

“I’ll let Becky know.” Threat delivered, Brenda rapped my desk with her knuckles before leaving for the kitchen and this week’s round of stale bagels.

I swallowed my saliva. Brenda hadn’t noticed the impact her words had on me (my earlier words describing her astute powers of observation were facetious), but in truth, I was barely able to contain myself. Some stranger coming to my desk to move my jalapeño spider-specks? Surely they were now mine, having taken up residence above my, well, residence.

Here’s the thing: as much as it pains me to admit—and I mean that literally—I am aware that certain things are outside of my control. Outside of my jurisdiction, if you will. Therefore, when I say that it is not within my means to stop Brenda from communicating with Becky, you will know that I have given the matter due consideration.

The corner ceiling tile above my desk, however, was most certainly within my jurisdiction, and I dealt with it thusly, negating any need for a visit from the exterminator in the first place. 

You’re wondering what I did, of course, and I’ll start by telling you that it was easier than you’d think. Breaking in. I considered staying later, past the time when the last person left for the night, crouching in a bathroom stall with my feet on the toilet in case someone came to check, but that seemed over-the-top, and I’m not an over-the-top person.

Instead, I merely pulled the fire alarm—elbowed it, really, in case they dust for prints—and made sure that I filed in and out right behind Marty, the keeper of the keys. When we returned inside, I took advantage of the general grousing and grumbling about the increasing fickleness of our fire safety system to note where Marty hid the key. Under his succulent, the drooping victim of one too many waterings.

From there, the plan was obvious. Swipe the key, unlock the fire door, wipe the key, return the key, and voila. The building was mine.

And so it was.

My initial inclination was to remove the spider-specks not only from their ceiling-tile abode, but from the greater office building altogether. For various logistical reasons, not least of which being that I don’t have room in the back of my Civic for numerous afflicted ceiling tiles, this wasn’t an option. Instead, I chose to relocate the tiles to a relatively self-contained space. A storage room, in other words.

Thankfully, I knew just the storage room—the one housing the obsolete fax machines and that one copier that Brenda spilled an entire half-gallon of sweet tea on during our party last December. My storage room plan B (which really should have been plan A) had the added benefit of a multitude of additional ceiling tiles, ripe for a switch-and-replace operation.

The less time spent detailing the logistics of that switch-and-replace operation, the better. Suffice to say that it was sweaty business. Ceiling tiles, while light in weight, are unwieldy things. Doubly so when one is attempting to avoid disturbing spider-specks.

And the spider-specks! To say they’d grown is an understatement. Dozens had turned into hundreds, jalapeño seeds into cherry pits. If you think that sounds unsettling—spider-specks the size of cherry pits—you would be correct. Now that they were larger, it was possible to see the bristled legs, the pincers, the milky, opaque protuberances. Now that they were larger, it was clearer than ever that these were no spiders. I’ll keep referring to them as such for continuity, but trust me when I say that these were something else altogether.

Once the afflicted tiles (and their specks) were reinstated in the storage room beneath the stairs, I made a quick exit, following my aforementioned plan to a tee. Obviously, I was not caught.

The rest of the week and most of the next passed in the following fashion. First, I’d arrive at work and spend the morning completing my assigned tasks according to my regular routine. No deviations. I’d narrowly avoided Brenda’s exterminator, and I wasn’t taking any chances. It was during lunch that I made a slight adjustment to my daily plan, one so subtle that none of my coworkers were any the wiser.

Now, I’ve always taken a brief trip to the mail room on the first floor—I bet you can see where this is going—around noon. I continued this pattern, adding in a detour to the storage room to visit my specks. Every day, they grew larger, multiplying almost exponentially. The thrill it gave me to enter that space, to flick on the fluorescents and take in the ever-expanding speckled blanket lining the ceiling tiles . . . nearly indescribable.

During those early days, I allowed myself a mere five minutes per day. What a five minutes it was, though. You see, the specks had started moving again. In fact, they only moved in my presence, sensing a kindred spirit.

It should come as no surprise that a single five minutes eventually became several five-minute trips, and that turned into several ten-minute trips, and so on. I remained careful, but the pull of my specks grew intense, to say the least. By the time the spider-specks were the size of peach pits (no longer anything close to specks, in truth), I was breaking nearly every hour to tend to them.

“Stomach troubles?” Brenda asked when I passed her desk for the third time one morning. Another Tuesday, I think it was. No, I know it was—I’d brought the specks an offering of several asiago bagels. They hadn’t been terribly enthused.

“Of a sort,” I replied.

Embarrassing, I suppose, but there was an extraneous restroom by the storage room. I’d allowed the others to perceive that as my destination.

My answer wasn’t a lie, though. There were stomach issues at play, they simply weren’t mine. As previously alluded to, I’d begun feeding my spider-specks. They demanded it, really, and who was I to resist? I was merely their humble human caretaker.

“You should look into fiber supplements,” Brenda told me when I returned.

I let her know that I’d take that under advisement. That was a lie, I would not be doing that.

What I did, however, was change my schedule again. I let the others think that it was due to my illness, that I was coming early and staying late due to a mysterious stomach ailment. In reality, I couldn’t stay away. Separation from my specks, especially as they reached new heights in terms of number and size (golf-ball size! baseball size! softball size!), was pure torture. I needed access at all hours in order to document their progression. In order to feed them—they were hungry things, my specks.

For a while, all was well. I worked a bit and monitored a lot, and nary a suspicion was voiced. I was tired, borderline anemic, but my specks were content. Appeased. Everything was fine—perfect, even—until that exterminator arrived. Brenda hadn’t seen any more spider-specks—I’d made sure of that—but she’d heard them, and that was enough. All my work, all my plans, foiled in a rustling instant.

That brings us to this very moment. I overheard Brenda this morning, by the bagels, and I knew that it was time. That it is time. I’ve prepared the specks, let them know that they have a visitor coming. That they have a surprise coming. I’ve dropped a hint, let Brenda overhear me mentioning that I heard a sound or two coming from the old fax machine room.

It’s the least I can do for my spider-specks. They’re now the size of cantaloupes. Did I tell you that? You can barely enter the storage room. It’s bursting at the seams, but that’s a moot point—the rest of the office will belong to them, soon enough. And they’re ready for it. Their web is spun, as it were.

Do you see why I call them spiders? It’s the way they pull you in. The way they snare their prey.

She’s talking to the exterminator right now, scratching her ankle with her toenail while they stand beside the emergency exit. I still have the key, just in case, but I don’t think I’ll need it. After all, the specks are strong, and I have a feeling that it’ll be quick. They’re very hungry.

—

Catherine Simpson is a writer, editor, and wanderer based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Most recently, her work can be found in Charlottesville Fantastic, an anthology of fantasy short stories.