A NOMINATION FOR OFFICIAL STATE SPIDER
By Larkin Weyand
Turning onto a dead-end street. Cookie-cutter houses, finding mine. Parking in the street because of an oil leak. Opening my door. My daughters, in princess pajamas, run to me, hug me, urge me: “Come see.”
They race to the front door. Leave it open. Inside, they tiptoe around a minefield of overturned glass cups. Inside each one, a wolf spider.
“So big. They might have bones.”
Years later, a different house. The girls share the basement. More spiders. More glass cups. Still incapable of killing them, they contain the spiders in known places of their shared spaces.
One dies, under a glass, on a shelf.
It’s been years.
It’s still there. The girls are not.
We have not moved the cup. It’s something: Come see.
Larkin Weyand teaches English at Viewpoint Middle School in Lehi. He has twice won the Utah Original Writing Competition, once for his short story collection “All the Pennsylvania Left to See” (2011) and once for his short story “The Birth Canal” (2017). His short story credits include Inscape, Verdad, Touchstones, The Tonopah Review, The Rio Grande Review, The Blinking Cursor, Blood Lotus and 15 Bytes. He is currently working on a novel called “The Bathtub.” He can be found in Pleasant Grove.