I was twenty-two and nervous, readingabout the two men on whom I’d hoistedthe balance beam of my thesis on poetry.They reminisced about the day they surroundeda young girl walking home from school untilshe pleaded with them, Go away please go awayplease please. Later, one of them wrote a poemin which girls walk home from school, touchingtheir avid mouths with pink sugar on a stick.That morning, stranger, you and I met for the firstand only time, and something about my ringletsand pink sundress, my cuticles bitten to the quick,urged you to pucker at me, to spit a wet massonto my bare legs as I walked to the library.That morning, my mother was dying in another country,treading water with her insurance. I can’t say for surewhat she did that day, of course—I lived an oceanbeyond her, next to you and your smirk, next tothe bridges trembling lacework shadows overthe stained river—but I imagine her working alone(she usually worked, was usually alone), and asyour spit slid along my ankle and into my shoe, perhapsshe was dreaming up cures ex machina, each one a brightarrow bearing her name back to her. What I do know—she saved every message I left on her phone, she was so certainsomeone somewhere wished me harm. She never knewI did the same, her voice nestled in the Nokia gleamingknowingly in my palm. Before she died, she confessed,half-ashamed, how she promised the spiders fatteningalong her walls that she’d let them live as long as she lived.After she died, spider silk poured from every cornerof her house. After she died, I swept them all down.