I commend you on your beneficence, your pious dedication to coexistence
even though your policy of capture and release when faced with the ones
who give you the heebie-jeebs smacks of hypocrisy. I still suffer night
terrors, witnessing your clumsy rescue of the millipede, filaments of disembodied
legs left wriggling on the floor when you lifted the lidded cup. Yet your zeal
for community education does further the cause. “Don’t kill your spiders.
Spiders kill your ants.” So the raised boot heel retreated and with it
the shadow of death. But every mercy has its reasons and its limits. I offered
you hoards, a hundred babies scattered across your ceiling like stars pulling
close the whitewashed floor of heaven. Kronos couldn’t have been more
monstrous, dragging a chair across the room, climbing, crushing
each body with the pad of your thumb, one by one, until every pinpoint of life
was extinguished. Was it mercy to leave me a hollowed carapace
in the corner, weeping my sticky silk? You’ve placed the chair back
by the table. I gather back my threads to weave another creature’s shroud.
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