This piece is an autofictional seed for the Autofiction x Worldbuilding submissions call. It inspired this other piece.

Squatter

A zebra spider has made her home under the garden table on my patio.

Zebra spiders are an enterprising little variety of common jumping spider (note that ‘common’ and ‘jumping’ are two words which need not ever be so close to the word ‘spider’), and mine has spun her web between both garden chairs and the table in a wild feat of ingenuity a thousand times the size of her tiny body. Zebra spiders, apparently, love man-made habitats with their array of vertical surfaces for scaling.

As I break apart her latest creation, she lets me know I won’t being doing so in peace: she scurries out from beneath the table and stomps her eight fuzzy feet in my direction as if to say, ‘Hey! Fuck you! You fucking giant! That’s my house! Asshole!’

And so, I go about my destruction with mild moral abasement, and, defeated, she settles once again on the underside of the table. I sit, I drink my coffee.

I think this is my table.

I’m so very wrong, she reminds me. She re-appears and scuttles along the table’s edge, stopping to look directly at me before proceeding to fling her entire miniscule, stripe-laden body through the air from the table onto the arm of my chair such that there is no doubt that she is a jumping spider. I eject myself so fast from my seat that there is also no doubt who won this round.

And so it goes. We argue over rightful occupancy.

Even as I sit writing this, she has popped out from beneath the table again to say hello – as if called by my melancholy brooding about our co-habitation situation. She looks at my books, my notebook, my new coffee cup.

She huffs, ‘Oh, it’s you, you fucking squatter.’

One of us will have to give up, eventually. I admire her infinitely for her persistence, her ability to rebuild. But I promise this is not going to turn into one of those essays where I wax lyrical about the small and ephemeral nature of life and all its beauty, this is about how I am a complete chicken-shit and I want my table back. Like some weak-hearted giant easily scared away by an aggressive display of territorialism from Mother Nature’s tiniest acrobat.

‘You could just buy another table,’ she suggests. I could, that’s true.

‘I could also name you Maggie and we could be best friends,’ I say, this is the first time I’ve ever spoken to her.

She snorts, ‘I’m not your pet, fuck off.’

I decide at this point that’s just going to be how it is: the most vulgar arachnid in the world lives in my garden table, or perhaps I drink my coffee on her roof.