The Myth of Wile E

Diminishing Resources

The morning after my birthday, the spiderweb had been kind of patched back together.

At first I thought the spider had written a message of some sort. It almost looked like the mathematical symbol for "not equal to," or maybe "not parallel." Then again, from the side it kind of looked like an H or an A. I started to get excited, thinking that the magazine had inspired my housemate. The web didn't have much of a plot, but it was a start. A journey of a thousand words, after all, begins with a single letter. It seemed like the spider might be catching the writing bug.

But no; as it turned out, this was just a hasty mending of the web from the regrettable Cheese Incident. It occurred to me that this may have worsened the spider's chances of success somewhat—after all, a nice pristine web is practically invisible, but a marred one is kind of obvious. Wouldn't the bugs steer clear?

And then I thought about my own battle-scarred poems and figured the spider was just doing the best it could with its diminishing resources.