Words (gesture)

With her right arm tied to the body and her right leg fixated in a splint she realized she wouldn't catch any more mosquitoes that summer. The spider upon her head could as well play in her hair and make its nest. That would be her only chance to get the small beasts. She wouldn't call for him because of a mosquito of course. Not for a strange smell in the room either. He would smell it as well if it had something to do with gas, which it hadn't, they didn't have gas cooker. So he probably wouldn't connect any smell with gas.
She focused on the spider.
How many of them had she killed over the years?
This one didn't know about that, did it? It was a fairly big one, active in its web. When she took them with the vacuum she used to imagine them building a new nest in the dust bag. They got a whole village down there. That's why she didn't like the idea of keeping the vacuum in the kitchen. At one point they had to get out of the dust bag and do the migration up through the ribbed pipe. She supposed that was what anyone in front of a pipe would do. If you saw light at the end of something, you would start wandering towards it, no?
So she kept the vacuum in the basement and asked him to get it for her twice a week.
There was no point in thinking about what it would be like in six weeks, five weeks and two days to be precise. What a rat's nest she would find. All the things she couldn't ask him to do. It didn't matter.  She kept saying that to herself. She was lucky,  so many much younger people were killed in the traffic every day.
His steps on the stairs, those big feet approaching the bedroom.
Her girlfriends would once ask what size he was. No one could compete with his ten and a half, she knew that. They would giggle.
They were five, then four and in the end they were just the two of them, her and Heather. They stuck together while waiting for life to begin. Life began the day they got married. Today they were much more independent. Or they pretended to be. Things still changed when people got married, she could tell. She didn't quite understand why they were so ashamed of that. Or why the shame had moved in at her house as well. Not a big, dark shame, certainly not, just enough to make her twist the truth a little sometimes.
He wouldn't correct her. It was like he knew they needed those small corrections. It wasn't good for anybody to hear things about oneself that wasn't true.
Hands didn't have numbers, his were just big, they used to remind her of her fathers, then her grandfather. He had a father's hands from the beginning.
She remembered her granddad's hands very well. The veins, the dark spots, the way they seemed to forget what they held on to.
In snow his boots looked too big for him. That was last year. She did her thing in the kitchen. Now and then she saw him passing between the shed and the lawn and the man was tall and held himself straight. Only the boots seemed to flap around his legs. Those boots were too old anyway.
- So there you are, he said and kissed her forehead.
- Have you seen the spider up there? It keeps dipping its feet in my hair.
He looked at the spider. She looked at it with him.  It seemed smaller now. There were probably two of them, a male and a female, she presumed.
He patted her hand.
- Do you want me to get rid of it?
- It wouldn't help, would it? There will just be another.
He sat by her side in his own thoughts for a while.
- Look, what we can do, he said.
He reached out for one of her pins. Then he took the front of her hair and put it up with the pin, gently, so gently.
- Now you don't get it into your eyes anymore. Better, no?