Toby Burke
.com

 

The Spider in the Mirror

The spider had been living in his driver-side mirror for about a month.

Each morning as he climbed into the car the same thing caught his eye – the web. There it was again; crude, miss-shaped, stretching from the right side of the mirror to its base against the car door. He would drive to work, watching it shake in the wind; never actually seeing the spider, but still imagining it back there, behind the mirror, trying to account for the great, inconsistent winds of the twenty-minute drive that would, by its end, destroy the web. Just as it did every day.

If only he could lure the spider out, he thought, for a conversation. He imagined how it might go: Look, about the web… I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, because I really don’t mind you putting it there… (The spider would perhaps nod, nervously) …But as I’m sure you’ve observed, it’s not really working out. That’s not a regular breeze every morning – I’m driving your home down the road at up to 60 kilometres an hour, sometimes 70, and your web just doesn’t stand a chance!

Of course, such a conversation was impossible. So the web was there every morning. Some days surviving until the river, sometimes to the park near the church, or the crossing where the children tumbled past on their way to school – but never all the way until the end of the trip.

Thinking about the conversation again, he wondered: even if he and the spider could have a little chat, would it make any difference? And would either of them really want it to?

 

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