Harold\u2019s apartment was small and messy.\u00a0 He hadn\u2019t vacuumed the faded green carpet in weeks and its odor suggested dampness and rot.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Harold rarely intervened with a rag because he thought it would disrupt the literary order.<\/p>\n
Though he was marginally concerned he hadn\u2019t dusted the rest of the house, he wasn\u2019t aware his otherwise clean bathroom also needed it and he would\u2019ve remained ignorant if not for one afternoon being startled by an enormous ant churning atop the toilet tank.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But the ant didn\u2019t hit the floor.\u00a0 It was trapped in an invisible spider web.\u00a0 Naturally it was invisible.\u00a0 Even Harold would\u2019ve removed a spider web there if he\u2019d seen it.\u00a0 He still couldn\u2019t see it.\u00a0 But it had to be there.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s back, flailing and biting and projecting great violence.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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