My Spider Problem

Spider, spider in the sink

Trolling for a simple drink

Then I worry late at night

Does it linger out of sight

I can’t sleep. Again, another night.

It’s the thought of death that triumphs over the nightly ingested 10MG tablet of Zolpidem that increasingly occupies my mind. Why would it not when my 81st birthday passed yesterday?

Not that I think there is an afterlife. No heaven or hell or any consciousness. I believe being dead will be like before birth. Nothingness. What I think is that dying could be painful. I am not good with physical pain, being luckily spared from much of it. 

The things I think about now living alone. Never needed Ambien when in bed with a woman. 

This evening after spending hours at my desk writing what I hope will be my first novel, I went to the bathroom, switched on the light, and to my shock I saw a spider in the sink. Black as coal, its body about the size of a dime, seeking a drink of water I assumed.

I wanted it out of the sink, out of my cottage. How to do that?

My thought was to dampen the wash cloth and use it to pick up the spider and drop it down the toilet. No, too dangerous; the spider might be able to bite through it. I pulled the handle of the sink stopper, turned on the spigot to drown the spider. I watched as the water rose in the sink, mesmerized by how the spider fought for its life, its eight legs frantically clamoring up the enamel curl. I watched the creature’s gallant struggle to live, an evolutionary instinct more fundamental than reproduction. 

I thought how it must feel to be in a situation of a continuous struggle to live. And the spider’s fight against impossible odds.

Seconds turned into a minute and still the unwelcome visitor fought an unwinnable battle it never imagined. I thought drowning would be a painful death, no doctor, no drugs, only my lungs filling with water, breath receding. Pain.

I took a wash cloth soaked it in spigot water and put the spider out of its pain and life. 

I felt a need to know more about spiders. A Google search told me spiders procreate like we do, using his pedipalps (appendages) attached to its head and thorax which are used as sensory organs to insert the male’s sperm into both the female spider's genital openings. Unlike us usually, after sex the male kills the female or the reverse.

I got into bed, pulled the covers up, and thought about bygone nights of sex and wondering how my ending might come.