Diana Darby ** "I V" ** Intravenous

Still Stuck

I am in my office
watching a spider crawl
across the floor.
It is a nasty looking thing
with fast moving legs,
scurrying about in every direction
as if it were being blown about by the ceiling fan.
I want to step on him
and end his life,
before he bites me
or gets lost in my guitar strap,
but I can’t do it.
For days I have watched a roach crawl in the kitchen window,
stuck between the screen and the glass,
unable to get in or out.
At night when I would come in to the kitchen for a glass of water,
he would be in the middle of the window,
like a Peeping Tom
and by morning,
he would be pressed in to the wood frame,
flat,
as if in hiding for the day.
Each day I looked for him,
confident that he would be gone,
somehow slipped through the cracks,
and on his way,
but each morning
he was always there.
Still stuck.
After about four days,
I started to wonder
how he survived in there,
day after day
with no food or water
and yet
still remained
so full of life.
He was a marvel,
of sorts.
A weird kind of Lance Armstrong.
I wanted to free him.
To reward him for his endurance,
but I couldn’t get the outside screen open
and I wasn’t about to open the inside window
and risk him getting loose in the house.
So I just left him there
hoping he would find his way to the outside.
It went on like this
day after day,
until
Sunday morning
when the Open House arrived.
I knew I couldn’t leave him there any longer
because most people wouldn’t view him as a selling point,
like hardwood floors or French doors,
so I did the only thing I could do,
I got out the insect spray,
opened the window for a second,
and sprayed the wood frame.
A few moments later
I watched him run across the wet wood,
fall on to his back,
writhe around uncontrollably,
and die.
That night,
as I sat in the kitchen booth eating my soup,
I looked at the empty window screen
and I felt almost
lonely
without him there.
Strange,
the things we become used to.