See Me Scared to Move
4 min read
Today, see me scared to move. It’s before sunrise, dark as a mountain of coal. I’ve climbed down concrete stairs from the road to the walkway, and I’m fumbling with keys in my left hand. Unable to locate the one I need, I turn on a black steel Maglite with my right thumb. The beam shoots up like a fiery barrel launched from a catapult, highlighting a finely-spun shroud that seems to cover the entire house. It’s like the roof and walls have grown hair, old and silver, with a few parts crafting holes for eyes.
I’ve been terrified of spiders as long as I can remember, my fear of them as impenetrable and irrational as my fear of talking to people I don’t know. I react the same way: paralysis in tongue and body so I can’t speak or move. That’s for one spider or one new person in the room. How lost am I in a crowd?
Half an hour ago, I finished my shift as a nighttime security guard at the Capitol complex in Charleston. It’s my first summer job after a year away at college. I patrol the grounds, check for unlocked doors or jimmied windows, keep an eye out for anything suspicious, chase off teens not much younger than me trying to get laid behind tall rows of decorative hedges. I’m meant to be more of a presence, a body in the dark to ward off evildoers and shenanigans. Of course, in the cap and uniform, I look like a twelve-year-old playing dress-up. Not particularly intimidating.
“That’s what the flashlight’s for,” my boss told me on the first night. “Law says you can’t carry a gun since you’re not a real cop, but this baby…” He waved a long, metallic baton that looked like a piston from a machine that builds other pistons. “…you can have this. Have to have this. You make sure it’s good and hard and, shit fire, you can give a guy a good whack if it comes to that.”
I don’t imagine it coming to that. I spend most nights wandering the grounds and writing little poems about shadows in the notebook I’m supposed to keep in my breast pocket for jotting down facts if an incident occurs. So far, none have, aside from the coitus interruptus with the teenagers, and I don’t intend to write a report about that.
I stand there for ten minutes before forcing a leg to move as if I’ve been poisoned and the drug has begun to wear off. I step robotically toward the front door. The walkway seems as if it goes on for miles.
All these nights pass with the same incredible slowness. It’s 1990, and I’ve yet to encounter the internet, America Online, smartphones, YouTube, Facebook, or anything that might occupy a mind astray in the dark. I have my Maglite and notebook. I walk and walk, sweating through the heavy fabric of this ridiculous uniform. The brim of my cap gets so wet that the bill slides over my eyes.
It’s only a summer job, I tell myself. Another six weeks, and I’ll be back at the university.
Still, slowness has an unbearable weight. Like fear.
At the door, I see them: dozens of zebra-striped legs, or maybe hundreds. I don’t know what kind of spiders these are, whether they’re dangerous, or how they’ve erected a circus tent where my house should be. My body wants to shut down again. I won’t let it. I’m so close to the spiders that my skin could find itself encased in silk.
…you can have this, my boss had said, and …if it comes to that.
I lift the Maglite and take quick swipes at the webbing around the door, then hop backward to make sure nothing falls on me. The metal doesn’t bludgeon or squash, but it clears a path to the keyhole. I unlock the door, lunge through the entrance, shut the door back, then beat myself as if I’m on fire, the flashlight’s beam bouncing around the walls and ceiling as if aimed by a burglar too drunk to successfully ransack a drawer. All of this I do while hoping not to make too much noise and wake my parents.
Now my skin itches all over. It feels like things are crawling on me. Not frozen in place anymore, I rush down to my basement room, only injuring myself on one doorknob caught by a high-speed elbow. I strip off my uniform, toss my cap on the floor, then step into the shower, letting hot water wash away my concerns. It doesn’t help.
The Capitol complex has the most beautiful shadows. Circles of them. Monoliths. Long and short ones. A few shaped like animals or people. Every night, I find a new one to write about. Despite all the loveliness I see, my poems are filled with horror themes and imagery. The mind views from a different vantage at night.
It’s almost 5:30. I’ve lost an hour getting from the car to my bed. I reach into a drawer for sample packs of sleeping pills that help me rest after an anxious night. The drug’s called Halcion, a play on words. It is said that it will soon be removed from the market because it supposedly makes some people psychotic. This morning, I take two.
When I wake around noon, I stumble upstairs for coffee. Through the giant picture windows in the living room, I find no traces of the spiderwebs. They’ve been erased as quickly as they must have been built. I can’t understand what I’ve seen, but believe it’s something that only happens at night.
“That’s it,” I say to no one, deciding to put in my two weeks’ notice this evening. Well, if I decide to go back to work at all.
Author: Ace Boggess is author of eight books of poetry, most recently Tell Us How to Live (Fernwood Press, 2025) and My Pandemic / Gratitude List (Mōtus Audāx Press, 2025). His writing has appeared in Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Hanging Loose, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes, watches Criterion films, and tries to stay out of trouble. His first short-story collection, Always One Mistake, was recently released by Running Wild Press.