The Spider God

It was the tiniest spider the man had ever seen, no bigger than a black dot from a ballpoint pen. The man would not have noticed it, had it not been for the four legs symmetrically splayed on either side of the spec, and its frenzied, unsuccessful attempts to escape the sink, as the giant hovered above it.

The man, though not fond of spiders, was respectful of life and would catch six and eight-legged intruders in a jar, then deposit them outside. But this one was far too small to catch.

Intent on washing his hands, the man could have ignored the tiny creature and allowed the splashing to wash the spider down the drain, but the struggling of the creature, its desperation to live, and the utter smallness of the spider touched his heart. He would not allow this fragile creature to suffer a cruel death by drowning.

He reached behind him and tore off a sheet of toilet paper. It was two-ply, so he separated the layers, then slowly and gently placed one denuded sheet close to the spider, hoping to coax him onto it and thus taken to safety. But the spider, terrified of the paper, ran in a frenzy around the sink.

The man took the second of the two plies and, trapping the tiny arachnid between the papers, forced the creature to choose between one sheet and the other. But the spider chose neither; he just stood frozen, trapped, and waiting for death. Using the edge of one sheet, the man gently pushed the spider up and out of the bowl and safely onto the crest, then threw the paper into the toilet.

The little spider remained still, staring up at the man with shock and amazement, looking up at the giant who had spared him and indeed saved him, then slowly crawled toward the space between the wall and the sink, turned once more to look at the man and descended.

The man washed and dried his hands, turned off the light, and left the room, happy to have saved a life, but thinking no more about it. He walked to the kitchen, prepared a bowl of Cheese Doodles, carried it to his couch, sat down with feet up on the coffee table, and resumed watching the midnight Christmas horror flick he’d paused to answer nature’s call.

Hidden in the crack, the tiny spider considered this giant that had saved him, and sensing another eight-legged predator farther down in the crevice, decided to seek out the giant for protection.

And so the tiny spider followed the man, scampering along the walls rather than traversing the tile where a larger spider might speed from beneath the floorboard to eat him. He would be safe once in the man's presence.

On his journey, he found many threads of those who had traveled this path before, and in one corner he spied a dusty web with several empty husks of spiders, some larger than himself. He hurried on.

After a lengthy lateral trek, he arrived at the giant’s lair, a dark room illuminated only by the flickering light of a large rectangle to which the giant’s gaze seemed affixed. Booming sounds bounced off the walls as the giant crunched on orange, lifeless, juiceless worm-like things.

From the flickering light, the boom and vibrations, the little spider grew frightened. He feared there might be others like himself, but older and larger, hiding under the couch and in the cracks between the furniture and the wall. Safety could only come from being near the giant.

He scampered down the wall, to the back of the couch, and as the noise from the wall reached a crescendo, he jumped onto the giant itself.

The man, sensing something on his neck, swatted without thinking, and the tiny spider became a tiny splat covered in orange powder.

This being the Christmas season, I wanted to write a story about joy. There was joy in this simple story, The man was joyous for having saved a life and the tiny spider was joyous for having been saved and finding a protector. But joy is fleeting, and it always ends the same way in fear, discomfort, and ultimately death.