Spiders

Two spiders. Stood face to face, each waiting for the other to make a move. Between them, the fly – caught in a mishmash of webs spun around him he ceaselessly searches for an escape from their game. To no avail. But the spiders are more preoccupied with each other, the atmosphere between them is intense, every time one of them moves the slightest nanometre the other has to mimic him. Eyes locked, the game continues.

And in the real world, the stench of booze and smoke finally overpowered me. I was sat, pretending not to listen to the two of them bicker over who was in charge of what and who would send the Machiavelli boys (ugh) to pick up the racket from the newest shop. I tapped my nails on the worktop. Just once, and walked out of the room. He would follow me, he always did. I shut my eyes and the memory of the last night we spent together flickered behind my eyes.

And back in the present I had to wipe a tear from my eye.

‘Luckily...’ I told the officer seriously.

‘Why do you say that?’ He looked at me in the dim light of his office, the towers of paper that were his in tray casting shadows in the corner of the room.

‘I ... I am alive...’

I was lucky I walked out of the room when I did. You see, had I not walked out of the room when I did, I might have been too late. A second either way and I...the thought almost makes me...it almost scares me. I shouldn’t have been there. That explosion wasn’t meant for me.

‘No,’ I said it almost as though trying to reassure myself, ‘it wasn’t.’

The officer...the commissario made a note on his book and looked at me expectantly, ‘the house exploded.’

And Paolo...Paolo is dead and it is my fault. The ground shook underneath me as a little old woman came out of the shop to help me and backed away as she saw my face, ‘Pasqualina!’

The two spiders encircle the fly, which wriggles helplessly against the tidal wave of web that it is caught in. And then the fly can no longer see and it...it’s at the spiders’ mercy.

‘Yes, I am Angela Pasqualina, the daughter of...his daughter.’

He stopped dead for a moment, cogs whirring in his mind – he snapped his notepad shut and walked around it coming to face me. Deliberately, he held my gaze and I didn’t even brush the strand of hair out from under my eye I was watching him press his button so intently. There was a buzz and then the one obviously placed camera that covered the room was turned off.

‘A piece of advice,’ he whispered in my ear and I could feel his breath on my face as he tried to remain...tried to pretend like he wasn’t breaking anybody’s code of silence, ‘A piece of advice bella, you go back to where you came from now. Pretend like nothing happened. Pretend like you weren’t where you were when the building blew up. Not even we can protect you from him, I am sorry.’

And one spider goes into battle with the other, fearing nothing as though it can and will conquer. Only to find itself being pushed backwards as the other bigger spider grabs the prey. Game over.

Meanwhile, in twenty first century Italy just two streets away from where Angelina Pasqualina is pouring her heart out, or getting as close as a mafia bosses daughter ever will to pouring her heart out – a man answers a phone:

‘Pronto.’

‘You did it then?’

‘Yes I did it, boss.’

‘Was she there? Did you see her?’

The man swallows uneasily, this isn’t good.

‘I see. Your efforts will be rewarded Ludovico.’

‘Boss.’

‘She has committed a crime against her family.’

The voice hung up.

Not two days later and the papers were reporting another explosion; what they didn’t report were the details of The Woman as she would later become known. Her face charred by the explosion and nobody willing to come forward to provide a DNA match the case was closed sooner than the door closed behind the old commissario who had announced his sudden retirement. The mystery that people wrote books about, the one thing that nobody could understand was what happened to the crime scene. The dead spider that was placed on the woman’s head two days after the explosion. The next day, a man called Carlo Di Giannini brought a villa in the south of Sicily. The same day, Ludovico who answered the phone disappeared – not that anyone noticed or wanted to notice.

As for the spiders, where the one died two more have now hatched and there are another six flies getting entangled in the circle of webs that is the spiders’ home. Creeping around the streets they wait in the shadows for prey that are dazzled by their glistening webs that they fail to see the shadows those webs cast in the warm sun.