Excerpt from Between Light and Storm by Esther Woolfson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Beginnings

A late October afternoon. It's quiet. The blue light of dusk beyond the windows melts into early darkness. I'm in the company of others but I'm the only human being here. I'm walking from room to room, tidying, putting things in order, preparing for the evening when I notice a smirr of shadow passing over the surface of the kitchen floor. It's faint, just an impression before a glance, a small wisp of something, of blown feather, a dust­ball gusted in a draught. In these old houses, floors have weather of their own: breezes, cyclones, polar easterlies. I follow it closely until I see that it's walking, minutely but steadily across the desert expanse of floor, a spider so tiny that she freezes me where I stand, hyper­aware suddenly of my feet, of my own power, my murderous boots. This is a fellow inhabitant of my house, brought in by the cold, the incessant rain. In autumn, they all begin to look for shelter and for food: the house mice, the field mice who will arrive soon, the spiders, large and small, like this one. In summer, houseflies gather, wasps rattle in the window corners. All year, woodlice crisscross the rooms with determined crustacean tread. There are too, the many creatures I can't see, ones too small for shadows.

This spider's clearly heading somewhere but I know I'll have to interrupt her journey in case, in doing other things, I forget she's there, step on her and end her life. Keeping my eye on her, I tear a page from a small notepad and bend to urge her onto it, her own brilliant yellow, magic­spider­carpet. Instead, she climbs onto my hand and walks about on my fingers for a while until I encourage her onto the paper so that I can carry her to safety, away from me, her only obvious danger. As a representative of my species, by comparison with this creature, I'm huge. As a member of my species, I carry the inescapable burden of the long, egregious history of human dealings with the lives of others. As an individual, I'm guilty by deed and by association. An almost­ invisible spider faces me with myself.

As I hold this other living being on a scrap of paper, I know that there isn't exactly a relationship between her and me but a skein of connections which ties us both into the centre of the questions that have been occupying my mind for a long time, ones I ask now of a member of an arachnid genus and family I can't immediately identify (Linyphiidae? Tegenaria?). What are we doing here together? How, in the light of the hundreds of millions of years of our shared past should I behave towards you and others? They're questions anyone might ask themselves from time to time, anyone who lives curiously or anxiously as many of us do now, frequently with bewilderment and anger, often in despair. The first question is easier than the second. We can trace back to where our common origins lie, the progression from the earliest beginnings of life to where we are now, the point where one single species threatens the future of all the rest.

The second question is different, almost too much for one human and one spider, too heavy for the line that connects us both to those common origins, the one we can trace back through history and the stout, enduring certitude of the people who have argued and prayed and postulated through the centuries to ask what we're doing and why. It seems part of a long and continuous line which threads back through the chronology of all our lives, tying us to everything we have done and do, the questions strung along it like faceted beads, winking light and darkness.

I carry the spider carefully, one hand round the edge of the paper to stop her from falling. The two of us are so different, in size, components, physiology. We live differently, do things differently. We eat differently, grasp differently, see differently and, were we to kill, we would carry it out differently. For all that, I know us to be the same, sharing far more than just a long and parallel past. One of the things we share is life. That alone should be enough to bestow on us both a wild, determined equality, this minute scrap of living entity and me. The other thing we share is occupying our own designated place, determined by the species we belong to, on the planet on which we live. As she heads off towards the edge of the yellow paper, all the exoskeleton and chelicerae, the spinnerets and many eyes and legs and the book lungs of her, I tip the paper slightly, holding it low so that she can resume her journey. In a moment, she is gone from the paper into her own shadowy, crepuscular realm behind the fridge, leaving me almost alone with all those thoughts and doubts we Homo sapiens have been considering since our long­ago brains sparked into fire and only sometimes light, thoughts relating to the many other species living on this earth, to size and power and rights in both past and future, to the consequences of our deeds, our ignorance or knowledge and on occasion, to the scale of our own personal culpability in the profound, lasting exploitation and destruction impelled by our species' needs and desires, its cruelty and greed. I try to imagine the concerns she's taking with her into that other universe behind the fridge. I could assume she feels relief in escape but that might be to imbue her with feelings she doesn't have. If I'm reluctant to endow her with humanlike feelings, it's not because I think she has no feelings or believe hers to be any less in strength or magnitude than my own. She might be more capable of deep emotions than any human but what exactly they are and how

Excerpted from Between Light and Storm by Esther Woolfson. Copyright © 2022 by Esther Woolfson. Excerpted by permission of Pegasus Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.