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Once you step onto the web, you are only a meal
Metaphor inspired by autumn in American politics, 10.08.20
Right outside the window where I usually sit to work during the day, there’s a pretty impressive funnel web. It’s not beautiful like an orb weaver’s. It’s crude looking, like it was created by clumsy hands, the threads haphazard and littered with leaves and carcass bits.
But even with its brutish appearance — or maybe because of it — it is astonishingly effective.
I’ve watched all summer with a kind of mesmerized horror as the spider has grown fatter and fatter on the liquefied insides of flies, ants, mosquitoes, small wasps, the occasional moth, and even sometimes other spiders much like himself.
When I’ve been by the window at the right moment, I’ve freed bumble bees and glimmering dragonflies, for no other reason than I like them and don’t think they deserve to die that way.
Sometimes out of the corner of my eye, I’ve seen quick movements, and I turn to look and see an insect fluttering in the web. I’ll think, “Oh, it’s working really hard to escape!” — but then upon closer inspection, I see it isn’t trying at all.
What I mistook for volition and an actual will to live is just the hollowed-out husk of some creature being blown about by a breeze, still stuck to the web that…
