I woke up early this morning and found a surprise on the wall of my bathroom: a Daddy Long-Legs.
With two squares of toilet paper, I squished this arachnid against the wall and threw it in the toilet.
I looked down into the porcelain at the poor fellow.
He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And it cost him his life.
Damn, I thought to myself as two of his long legs poked out around the edge of the toilet paper, this was a ‘Daddy’.
This was a father. Mama Long-Legs and the kids would never see him again.
Horrid.
I mourned him silently for a minute, and then remembered the reason I went to the bathroom in the first place. My morning pee.
The environmentalist in me thought nothing of it. I wasn’t going to waste water on two flushes.
It wasn’t until I let out a loud fart halfway through the pee that I realized the utter disrespect.
I was peeing on Daddy’s corpse.
What was I, some sort of barbarian?
To make matters worse, I wasn’t exactly hydrated. I had some friends over last night to watch basketball and had consumed a few beers, causing my pee to be a gross shade of orange and smell almost metallic.
Daddy didn’t deserve this.
I checked my surroundings to make sure no other spiders were around to witness this.
What if his son, Jimmy Long-Legs, was nearby and watched the brutal murder and desecration of his father’s body?
For a minute I put myself in Jimmy’s shoes and allowed myself to experience his trauma.
Daddy’s dead. Murdered. And the killer urinated on his corpse, tooting victoriously — mere seconds after taking his life.
The anger overcame him. He thought only of avenging his father.
They say Daddy Long-Legs are the most poisonous spiders in the world, but their mouths are too small to bite.
Curse my tiny mouth, thought Jimmy, but he was not going to give up on his quest for revenge.
He had heard rumors of a scientist, Professor Edith J. Long-Legs, from a nearby web who was developing a technology to capture their venom and pass it to the victim despite their tiny mouths.
Jimmy ventured west and found that the rumors were true. Edith had captured a bee in her web, surgically removed the stinger, and filled it with her own extracted venom, creating a makeshift poison-dart that she could shoot through a tube.
To demonstrate it’s power, she led Jimmy through a small opening into the attic of a nearby house and down through a vent overlooking the dining room.
A family of 5 sat at the table eating their dinner. The son was complaining about having to eat his vegetables.
“Come on Eric,” said the dad, “It’s just broccoli. It’s not going to kill you. Watch.”
He grabbed a piece from his son’s plate and put it in his mouth. He chewed for a second, then suddenly his eyes grew wide. The family panicked as he gasped for air, and then collapsed onto the ground.
Jimmy looked at Edith as she lowered the tube from her mouth. He looked back at the man’s body below and noticed the stinger lodged in the back of his neck.
Jimmy smiled. It worked.
My thoughts returned to the present as I exchanged an uneasy look with myself in the mirror. Jimmy was coming for me.
I shuddered at the thought. But that was a problem for another day.
First I wanted to send his father off in an honorable way. I decided to say a few words before I flushed.
“Daddy was a gentle, kind, loving spider — devoted to his family. While his physical body will float down through the sewers, his memory and spirit will live on through eternity.”
I imagined him washing down the pipes in his toilet-paper coffin, and floating along through the sewers.
And I said, “Don’t worry, we’ll all float on, alright.”
“Already, we’ll all float on, okay.”
And suddenly the gravity of it all hit me.
Through all the uncertainty in our lives, only death is guaranteed. This spider and I led very different lives, and had very little in common. But ultimately our fate is the same. Death is the destination we all share.
My voice cracked as I choked through the rest of the lyrics.
“Don’t worry even if things get heavy,” I croaked as a tear ran down my cheek. I whispered the last line, “We’ll all float on, alright.”
And then I flushed.
In silence, I watched as Daddy whirled around in a sea of fragrant orange urine before disappearing down the drain.
“Goodbye my friend,” I said as I wiped the tears from my eyes, “Until we meet again.”
I Just Realized Something 