The Spider and the Fly
It's my early day at work. Right next to my desk is a door we never use, so there's this hanging scrim between the door and the inside to create some privacy (it's a glass door) and block the sun.
I heard a persistent buzzing from behind the scrim and could see movement near some towels we use for insulation about the size of a large wasp.
"How'd we get a wasp in here?"
And then,
"Why is it buzzing so much? Is it dying?"
I pull the scrim to the side and look closer and the fly is struggling to escape a spider's grasp. It's amid spider webs hanging not in that perfect spiral but in an almost willy-nilly series of planes that remind me more of a stone quarry than of a spider web.
The violence makes me want to grab something and kill both of them. The fly to put it out of its misery (and to stop its buzzing, which I swear now sounds mournful - and causes me guilt/empathy) and the spider for perpetrating the murder.
Instead, I think about all the annoying fruit flies that've been hanging around this summer. And about the general annoyingness of flies.
That spider stays in its little house near a door we don't use. Indeed, if it was a place where we traversed on a regular basis, the spider couldn't have built its stone quarry web.
The buzzing stopped quite quickly as the spider receeded into a crevasse of the towel, probably to lay the fly, still alive yet paralyzed if I remember my nature channel correctly, next to some eggs.
I heard a persistent buzzing from behind the scrim and could see movement near some towels we use for insulation about the size of a large wasp.
"How'd we get a wasp in here?"
And then,
"Why is it buzzing so much? Is it dying?"
I pull the scrim to the side and look closer and the fly is struggling to escape a spider's grasp. It's amid spider webs hanging not in that perfect spiral but in an almost willy-nilly series of planes that remind me more of a stone quarry than of a spider web.
The violence makes me want to grab something and kill both of them. The fly to put it out of its misery (and to stop its buzzing, which I swear now sounds mournful - and causes me guilt/empathy) and the spider for perpetrating the murder.
Instead, I think about all the annoying fruit flies that've been hanging around this summer. And about the general annoyingness of flies.
That spider stays in its little house near a door we don't use. Indeed, if it was a place where we traversed on a regular basis, the spider couldn't have built its stone quarry web.
The buzzing stopped quite quickly as the spider receeded into a crevasse of the towel, probably to lay the fly, still alive yet paralyzed if I remember my nature channel correctly, next to some eggs.
posted by Brian at
9:03 AM
