A Game With a Giant

Spider (pixabay.com)

By the garden's fireplace, stretched between a tree and a wall, there's an enormous cobweb, in the center of which sits its proud owner. We have a little game together.

I toss a speck of dirt into the web. He, of course, knows it's not a fly, but he wants to please me, so he crouches sneakily, then swiftly rushes to it and grabs it fiercely at once with all his arms (he calls them legs). He sits there for a moment, cunningly glancing at how my face, a huge living mass filling his entire field of vision, smiles from one end to the other.

But there the game nears its end; the spider is on a hunt, and if he lingers with me for too long, he won't catch even a dead fly and will die of hunger, along with his spider wife and all the unhatched spiderlings.

But before he runs off to his duties, he quietly murmurs something by way of apology, skillfully untangles the speck from his web — and throws it back into my hand.

Tomáš Fülöpp
Sint-Agatha-Berchem, Belgium
December 1, 2023, December 26, 2023, December 27, 2023, January 9, 2024

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