Harold’s apartment was small and messy.  He hadn’t vacuumed the faded green carpet in weeks and its odor suggested dampness and rot.  Even more distressing, books new and worn, tall and short, hardcover and paperback huddled in too many bookshelves, and papers were strewn all over a large drafting board, and all that was a magnet for dust.  Harold rarely intervened with a rag because he thought it would disrupt the literary order.

Though he was marginally concerned he hadn’t dusted the rest of the house, he wasn’t aware his otherwise clean bathroom also needed it and he would’ve remained ignorant if not for one afternoon being startled by an enormous ant churning atop the toilet tank.  Harold almost ran from the cockroach-like creature but recovered his nerve and lunged and with his right hand struck the tank to the left of the ant and brushed hard right to knock it off.  But the ant didn’t hit the floor.  It was trapped in an invisible spider web.  Naturally it was invisible.  Even Harold would’ve removed a spider web there if he’d seen it.  He still couldn’t see it.  But it had to be there.

The ant was suspended in space, struggling, kicking its many legs, and Harold was fascinated when a spider, a tiny fellow half the size of the ant, sped up the delicately-woven web and jumped on the ant, which was knocked upside down, and the spider climbed around on the ant’s back, flailing and biting and projecting great violence.  In about a minute the defensive kicking of the ant had slowed and its movements continued to grind down, and just before its finale the ant was twisted face down where, if its eyes still worked, it would have seen two others ants, trapped and dead, in a slightly visible network of webs below.

When the besieged ant had altogether ceased moving beneath the mighty little spider, Harold grabbed some toilet paper and gathered the ant and the spider and invisible web and the two other ants and lower webs and threw all of them in the bowl and flushed.