Death of a Spider

I came upon the oddest sight a few weeks ago on the floor of my garage.  We have an upright freezer there, and on the front of the freezer, right at the bottom of the door, there’s a little green light that acts as an indicator to tell you if the freezer is working properly.  I call it the Blue Bell safety system.  As long as the light is green, the freezer is freezing and your Blue Bell ice cream is safe.  But if the light is red, you know that inside the freezer your half-gallon of Rocky Road is likely in distress and may need rescuing.

There on the garage floor, in front of the freezer, directly in the center of the beam of green light, was a rather large and rather dead spider.  Normally, I would have never given this a second glance.  I see dead spiders all the time on my garage floor.  But this particular dead spider caught my attention because of the way his lifeless body was positioned there, centered perfectly in the emerald glow.  It looked so intentional, so deliberately placed.  I left him lying there.  

I’ll admit to you that I left the poor fellow’s remains there for longer than I should have, strictly for my own morbid amusement (please don’t think less of me now).  My imagination ran wild as I speculated about the spider’s last few minutes of life.  It became a source of entertainment for me on my daily commute to work.  The way he was laying there so perfectly in the green luminosity, on his back, all eight legs sticking up, made me determined to come up with the probable circumstances of his demise. I imagined he could have been some great arachnid operatic tenor who had just sang his last magnificent oratorio, belting out the final words of the opera for a stunned audience of less talented ants and spiders standing before him.  But just as the last echoes of his voice reverberated between the walls of the garage, he succumbed to a massive heart attack or something, paying out his last breath there on the concrete stage.  He had left it all out there, alone under that single green spotlight, just as it should have been for a star of his stature.  

Each morning and each evening, as I walked past him to and from my truck, I chuckled to myself as I thought of this spider’s passing.  How did he end up there like that, summoned somehow in his final minutes to just this particular place, this mark, as if called to some magical theatrical beam?  What mysterious power had led him there?  What was he thinking about just before he died as he bathed in that heavenly green glow?  Were any of his spider friends with him there as he gave up his arachnid ghost?  Was I viewing the aftermath of a spiritual spider’s spectacular final religious experience?  His remains were there on the cold hard concrete, but the spider’s spirit was now joyfully in some heavenly master’s woven web somewhere up in the clouds.   

I wondered each day, with a passing glance, about his final minutes as he gradually succumbed to the after-effects of dragging a wayward leg through the generous, sticky residue of the Terro T2302 spider spray that I had sprayed along the baseboards a few weeks before.  He must have known he was on his last leg(s) as he felt the poison grip his hairy little body, making him frantically find the way to the light before it was too late. 

Or…perhaps he wasn’t a famous spider tenor at all.  Maybe he was nothin’ special, just a simple, run-of-the-mill, blue collar spider.  A hard-working, Joe Spiderman, just trying to survive in a big, crazy garage.  Maybe he was a procrastinator like me, and when he started to realize that his time in the garage was drawing nigh (thanks to me and my T2302), he decided to finally sing a song, dance a jig, play the guitar, or maybe even play some harmonicas.  Catching up on things he’d neglected to do but always wanted to do, right to the bitter end.  On his stage.  Under his green spotlight.  Wishing he had started earlier.