Tarantulas

Tarantulas enter Hazel’s reflections through a natural-history museum display of their shed skins, which she remembers as a stark image of bodily change without easy reassurance. The molting process gives her a language for thinking about pain and vulnerability, while its possibility of regrowth offers only a limited, imperfect form of renewal.

The Museum Display and Molting

Hazel had stood before a display of tarantula molts and reread its informational tablet for hours. The shed skins had seemed disconcertingly like pieces of tempura, but they offered her no spiritual comfort. Instead, learning about molting made her profoundly sad: the process felt like a psychic reading of her own fortune and, beyond that, of every living thing’s.

The account she absorbed was physically exacting. A spider may go weeks without eating, appear almost dead, develop fluid-weeping joints, and lose the hair on its stomach. The psychic stress is described as tremendous; interrupting a tarantula during molting can kill it. Even after the old skin is shed, the new one remains temporarily so vulnerable that crickets, among the insects the spider eats, can injure it.

Vulnerability and Regrowth

Molting offers no painless passage from one condition to another. Its hazards extend before and after the shedding itself: the spider must endure a period of apparent near-death, and its newly formed skin is exposed to harm. The display therefore makes transformation inseparable from risk rather than presenting it as a clean or immediate escape from an old state.

There is, however, a possibility of regrowth. If a tarantula has lost a leg, it can grow another, though the replacement will be smaller and less functional. Hazel sees this as a genuine second chance, but not as restoration without remainder: the new leg is likened to a spare tire, serviceable yet visibly diminished. Renewal is possible, while the consequences of injury remain legible.

Hazel’s Affinity with the Image

Hazel wonders whether molting is more painful than ordinary childbirth, imagining it as a kind of giving birth to oneself. Her comparison draws on her mother’s account of labor: the pain had been so intense that she wanted to die, and she recalled demanding that Hazel’s father shoot her while he explained that his antique inherited gun had no ammunition and would not fire. The memory gives Hazel a human measure of extreme physical pain, but not a way to rank it against the spider’s ordeal.

Hazel instead feels an affinity with the tarantula through her own pain and her sense that she is bad at life. The source of her suffering seems less specific than the spider’s bodily process, and she does not know whether she will ever be able to push it out and feel better. The tarantula’s molt thus becomes both an image of distress and a qualified hope: a living body may emerge changed and vulnerable, and something lost may grow back, but neither outcome promises an effortless recovery.