The Softhearted Spider

The softhearted spider didn’t like to catch flies.

Sure, she spun her web every night, same as the other spiders. But when she came back in the morning and found the day’s catch — usually two, maybe three flies wriggling in fear and frustration — she’d let as many go as she could.

I mean, she would’ve let all of them go, but she had to eat, after all.

It tore her apart to do it, though. The flies were really creatures just like her, she knew, just trying to make their way through the dark night. They probably had hopes and fears, the same as her. They must have had friends, neighbors and rivals, same as she did. So what gave her the right to suck their blood?

“It just seems so unfair,” she’d say to her friends, or to anyone who would listen, really. “Maybe I think about it too much, but it seems so unfair and cruel. They’re dead, you know? And they’re dead because of me, I killed them. And I can’t help but wonder, what kind of monster am I?”

Her friends would tell her, “You worry about it too much. You’re a spider, and spiders eat flies. And you should eat more flies, really, you’re a little on the small side.”

She shook her head, shutting all eight of her eyes. “I just wish it didn’t have to be this way. That I was different, or the world was different, or something was different. I wish I could just spin webs and not have to worry about catching flies with them.”

“You’re a sentimental idealist.”

She knew they were right. But that still didn’t change the way she felt about it, the way she terrified herself just by being what she was. It’s not like she chose to be a spider, anyway. If it had been up to her she’d have been a flower, living on sunlight alone, or maybe a mushroom, absorbing things that were already dead.

But she was a spider. And spiders weave webs to catch flies.

She tried hating the flies, to make it easier, and there was certainly no shortage of things to hate about them. They only had those two stupid bulbous eyes, instead of having eight of them like any self-respecting animal should. They flew through the air in idiot zigzags, totally incapable of grasping the refinement and grace of an aesthetic experience like web-weaving. They didn’t have enough legs, and the ones they had were clumsy little things, far too short for their shapeless bodies.

And that buzzing sound they made, horrible! Horrible.

And hating the flies helped the softhearted spider for a while. It made it easier to kill them and eat them when they showed up, at least. But she wasn’t any happier than she was before. Instead of feeling guilty and horrified by her own existence, now she felt angry and horrified by her own existence. Which by some measures was a distinct improvement, but when you factor in the way she’d snap at her friends and family with only the slightest provocation, it really wasn’t much of a net change. Instead of just hating herself for what she was, she found herself hating the world for making her be what she was.

Maybe you’re thinking she’s sounding like kind of an unpleasant spider at this point. And maybe if you met her it would be a challenge to love her. She definitely had her moments: plotting, tale-telling, here and there a bit of intrigue, you name it. But remember, all the nastiness in her character really wasn’t part of her, it was just something she couldn’t restrain because she was trying to cover over the really almost embarrassingly sentimental part of her that literally couldn’t bear to hurt a fly.

This all went on for some time. Until one night by the glow of a full moon, something changed.

That night the softhearted spider was spinning a web between a bush on one side, and an SUV on the other. Where once she’d taken a real delight in the craftsmanship of her webs, now she just went through the process mechanically — down, back, and around, over and over, cursing those damned flies under her breath.

Her work finally completed, she wandered over to stand on the side of the SUV and check her handiwork. Just a craftsman’s examination of her work to check for quality, understand — at least at first. She’d long covered over that part of her soul that could appreciate her own beauty.

And then — who knows? Maybe it was the moonlight. Maybe the technique of the thing had become second nature to her, so that it truly was an exquisite web. Maybe… oh, but who ever really knows the causes of things?

At any rate, she saw in that web something she’d lost for a long time. She saw the simple beauty of the web itself, the way she’d seen it while watching the adults spin webs when she was a child. Before she’d had to worry about the utilitarian practicalities of fly-catching — when she was innocent, and the web was just a web, just an achingly beautiful fact of nature, nothing more or less. Just the individual arcs coming together along the spokes of a wheel to form a spiral.

She saw that, and she remembered, and she wept.

As the tears rolled down from her eight eyes, a fly buzzed along and trapped itself in her web. With a twinge of disgust but with a heavy heart, she ventured over to the creature and began wrapping it up for later. With tears still in her eyes, she said, “I’m sorry, friend. You didn’t see my web until it was too late. I’d let you go, but I’m a spider. And spiders eat flies.”

She didn’t expect the fly to speak — she didn’t even think flies could speak. But when it did, what it said set her soul ringing with something she couldn’t name.

“So you… you think we don’t see the webs that catch us?”

“Of course not. How else would you ever get caught?”

“Don’t you know? Oh, we see them all right, and we know the danger. But we still come, because the beauty calls to us.”