lijah Katsova stepped out into the rest of his life and nearly collided with a woman being chased by a tiger.

‘Excuse me!’ She said and apologetically tucked her chin against her chest as she jostled him. He quickly stepped back into the doorway as the tiger lazily loped by, all amber and honey. Trailing behind it was a long black leather strop with metal bands clinking along the pavement. The end of it was shredded.

The early morning city was all lemon and dust, rich with people in motion, voices cracking over second coffees, chasing conversation over the roar of the metro. The sun was menacing some remaining storm clouds, rays singing golden around the deepening damp darkness of the past night.

The young day’s fog came up shy and short, certain of its noonday termination but uncaring, comfortable with its contracted life. The city ground was the fog’s playpen and people walked through it as if it were snow, post-holing invisible post-holes, blazing effortlessly forward and leaving no trails for those who might follow. The way the fog swept and swirled around the passage of dogs was especially beautiful, churning like milk poured into water. An angels’ eyelash settling on porcelain cheek could scarcely do so with such blameless serenity.

The passage of hours marked in black rigidity were churned out in increments by large clocks suspended by chains above the city, the chains spiralling heavenward and swallowed by the clouds.

It might rain again soon.

Occasionally, someone tapped on their horn although Elijah could not tell at what they were giving their staccato dismay. Autumn was at the foothills of winter and the people walked by breathing like locomotives. They were dressed in long coats of worsted grey or woollen black.

Cars are not as graceful as dogs, Elijah thought to himself, adjusting the round, furred hat on his head. He had a dark leather knapsack slung over one shoulder and had a green linen hardbound book in one hand.

Many of the people that walked along the pavement had corrupted faces. Elijah wondered if they saw his face as corrupted as well. He wondered also if the corruption was shallow or if it reached deep into the bodies and lives.

He passed by one of the wide plazas where men in green uniforms were working quickly to dismantle and remove a spider web that had overnight been drawn between two buildings. Traffic was being directed away from the clogged street. There were vans with spinning blue lights and a pair of huge blue trucks with extensible ladders on top. The men were spraying the web with water and attacking it with telescoping poles with electrified hooks on the end of them. Further along the street, a number of men stood around the body of the spider itself which was at least 15’ wide. It was supine on the street, looking like a black hirsute arthritic fist. They were drawing a huge white tarp that, even from Elijah’s distance, crackled as they unfolded it and shifted it over the body. Surrounding all of this was a crowd of people.

He was not normally the type to stare at these situations but this web was particularly huge and complex. Much of it was already destroyed by the chemical spray and the electrified web dismantling hooks but enough of its structure was still in tact to reveal the spider’s nocturnal genius in constructing something of elevated geometry. Perhaps it was sad that people didn’t appreciate the spiders’ artwork. The spiders themselves were harmless and passive, catching birds from their webs.