Arachnophobia

by D.S. Burton

You know, I used to think you were my doppelgänger. I got this notion from strands of hair, skin, and sweater vests glimpsed between canvas. I mean, we both were twenty-something, had dark hair, and took the community centre art class on Tuesdays. Yet we worked on opposite ends of the gallery. You seemed busy, distracted in your cocoon of canvases, though you wanted people to think that. My single portrait, the one I’d started in fall, covered just one angle: directly across from you.

Part of me wondered how many angles you’d painted yourself from, on those eight or ten or fifteen canvases that barricaded you from the other students. Each time you switched canvases, your chair aligned with another, as if you’d learned the exact tiles to keep yourself from view. You’d raise a brush over its white parapet like you’re signalling waitstaff, answer the instructor’s questions, and when the chime ended the freepaint, you’d go silent, continue working, and wouldn’t flip a single panel.

Today, I’d decided I’d finished my painting, and I couldn’t keep telling myself I didn’t care about yours—if only to see how you’d depicted our face in your style. I approached your wall of canvases, but couldn’t see overhead, so I hauled a stepstool beside your enclosure, climbed right up, and prepared to marvel at your fifteen-canvas magnum opus, or fifteen simultaneous magnum opuses, I didn’t yet know which.

What I saw instead was a disheveled man duel-wielding grubby brushes, sprawling elongated limbs from canvas 1 to canvas 12 like a spider. At times you dragged them across multiple canvases body-bag style, frightened yet begrudging, onto the next of many steps. Each canvas was a failed, defaced version of the next.

I was right about one thing: you looked just like me, down to the mole beneath our left eyes, your face an organic, poorly sculpted masquerade of mine.

But doppelgänger? Swing and a miss. That almost-face is just another one of your pet projects, a grand unveiling you never plan to unveil, forever unready to show the world.

You never noticed me overlooking your work, even as the chime ended class.

I dismantled the stepstool and thanked the instructor; I wouldn’t be returning. By then, you had already disappeared into your cocoon of blank space.

As you scuttered out the door carrying all fifteen canvases, still perfectly bordering around you, I could only imagine you really were a spider.

D.S. Burton is a horror and weird fiction writer studying creative writing at the University of New Brunswick. His award-winning novelette “The Whale Pavilion” is forthcoming in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Learn more at dsburton.com.