We used to visit Ah Ma down by the estate that doesn't exist anymore, the lovely one tucked so deep into the maze of side roads and parking lots that you were never sure it was the place twice. And yet each time she would be there at the door ushering us in, and it would be the same yellowed gate and the same peeling beige paint and the same melamine mugs filled with cups of Milo we made for ourselves, which always tasted slightly different from the Milo back home. Another consistency: the house was so high up that the leaves of the trees in the nearby park stuck through the kitchen window, bathing the living room in light green whenever we visited, which would always be in the late afternoon, a kind of dappled underwater twilight. Without these I would have hardly believed it to be the same house each time, with the furniture shifting in an imperceptible way each time, and the floral couch cushions each time growing a little smaller, and even my fingers each time fitting less and less easily into the handle of the melamine mug.

I don't know when she started keeping the spider but it was something that fascinated us kids. At that time our parents had begun to take turns taking us there because each could not bear the sight of the other in front of her, and in that small green space it would be my sister and I and one disinterested mom or dad commenting on the day's events or talking about clinic visits and insurance and other grown-up stuff we couldn't bear to hear. The spider, though, was alive and real. She had trapped it in a large glass biscuit jar and put it over the television with a few twigs and some dried leaves, and it sat motionless among them with its front legs held out like a horseshoe, like a wrestler, which tickled our fancy. Ah Ma said she had caught it when it crawled in through the window some time ago. It had seemed cruel to let it out when it had already grown used to the peaceful shelter of her home, so she held on to it just in case. The fruit flies that always hovered around the bananas were enough to feed it plenty, and it seemed to enjoy itself, and Ah Ma certainly seemed to enjoy herself keeping it, so our parents let her be. The spider, its waiting arms, the fragments of dried leaves bathed in green.

More jars appeared to the disapproval of our parents. Each of them contained a single spider, sometimes two, and the televisioned proved insufficient space so the whole collection spilled across the shelves, the floor, even a couple which had to be moved from the dusty couches whenever we came to visit. I wondered aloud whether there were enough fruit flies to feed them all and she just laughed. There was enough leaves in between the jars to support a litany of other nameless creatures, small black and moving things which I once had the fortune of seeing a spider clamp down on and swallow into its gullet, a marvellous play of nature which she said all came from the branches of the ever-growing tree. It had poked well in to the kitchen by now, almost touching the refridgerator. Pa spoke to Ma in hushed tones that night about calling a gardening company, or writing a letter to the town council about pruning activities, but nothing ever came of that, as surely as anything else between them. We were amazed by the variety of movement in the jars and their vast concentration of life.

The mantis was next. Emerald, almost plastic in its complexion it sat easy and still on Ah Ma's thumb and ate from a tiny black thing held between her other thumb and forefinger, a little creature that once had wings. Six bunches of bananas hung around the refridgerator symmetrically blackening. Pa, invigorated, started telling us about his past catching rare and exotic creatures that showed up in the edge of the jungle near his old school, how he and his friends would trade matchboxes full of beetles and spiders and things that fought and bit and moved, but my sister and I ignored him for Ah Ma and the graceful way she held the mantis on her thumb, surrounded by the green which grew ever more around her, refracted through the once-transparent glass jars. Back home we went on Pa's whirring iMac and pulled up all sorts of pictures of mantes and beetles and biting things, until it was dinnertime and we had to sit down and eat with our chopsticks and spoons.

Things came to a head when Ma found the frog in the melamine cup, and the worms inside the Milo. Leaves strewn all over the kitchen floor from last night's rain now brown and plastered to the tiles. The green light growing darker as the tree choked the light, and you could see the dappled shadows of the leaves spilling out of the front door. In those shadows writhed fruit flies and the smaller things that preceded them, a film of brown dust that caked every surface and wall. No jars and spiders from now on, Ma said. But idly us children wondered how long this would last. One by one we were made to screw open the tops and release them into the garden downstairs and a great many things scuttled out of them into the dirt between our hands. The jars sat at the same places now empty but the apartment remained full of us, me and sister and Ma with our hands in our laps, and Ah Ma staring out of the window lost in her jungle dreams.