Photograph. October 21, 07:25 P.M. Spray-paint spiders:
Two flashlight beams illuminate a weathered brick wall. The shutter speed is set a bit too slow, and there is blurring around the staggered bricks; sharp lines of mortar have been rendered dull. The bottom half of a window is visible at the top part of the frame, and there’s a glimpse of sidewalk down at the bottom. Otherwise, the picture is all faded red brick punctuated by lines of glossy black paint. And there is a hole in the center of the frame—a ragged crater, punched through the wall in some gesture of extreme violence.
And crawling out of the hole: a swarm of spray-paint spiders.
It is a vast army of simple shapes, sketched out in black lines—multijointed legs sprouting out from squat bodies. They are densest near the hole—where individual limbs reach out from the shattered crevice—and become sparser as they near the edges of the frame.
Only one spray-paint spider has made it all the way up to the window frame. Its bottom half is sprayed across brick and wood, and its top half is gone, vanished through a crack in the dirty glass.