Stabwool Home for Extruded Characters

Terrible news. Our spider is dead.

She was an orb weaver. Her species, as far as I could learn online, is supposed to live only for a year, lay eggs, and die. But she lived here for two years, and laid exactly 10 egg sacs during her life in our shower window, each of which spawned dozens of tiny spiderlings. I often saw her pregnant, or after a big meal, big and round and slow and graceful.

She died in battle, which I can respect and understand.

I went to the bathroom and looked towards her web out of habit, just to see what was up, and she wasn’t in her usual spot, so I looked around harder. I didn’t see her anywhere. I saw a few of her children, of varying ages, camped in different spots in the huge web. They have their own corners, a couple of them share one (one is twice the size of its neighbor). I thought maybe she died of old age, finally, and so I looked around among the fly corpses on the windowsill, but I didn’t see anything. I thought, perhaps she’s hiding in this dead thyme, so I blew carefully at the leaves to see if anything moved. There was nothing in there, so I looked at the dead bluebonnet beside it and blew there, and I saw a huge jumping spider move a little. It was holding something. It was holding legs. Big orb weaver legs. I blew again and it dropped them.

The jumping spider had sucked out all of the glorious motherly fatness of my arachnid matriarch. It was like a deflated balloon with big legs. Then the jumping spider looked up at me. It just fucking looked at me all .°oO„Oo°.

Even though she was probably breaking longevity records every single fat day of her fat life after her first brood and I knew this was gonna happen, I’m still kinda sad about it. Her children are numerous and relatively successful as far as these things go. I am some pig.

I’m gonna go put that jumping spider outside.

Pictured: the mother (dead) and the motherfucker.