Transition by Chris Klassen

At what point, the man wondered, does semi-light become semi-dark.  It was, he recognized, his first intriguing thought of the day after sitting immobile at his desk for hours with legs tightening and stomach growling.  And the idea had only come to him after looking out his window and noticing that the sun was beginning to set.  So it was becoming semi-light.  Or semi-dark.

The man picked up his quill pen and dipped it in the inkwell and wrote his new thought on the parchment paper in front of him and, at the completion of the sentence, he put his pen down because he didn’t have any more ideas.

Maybe there’s an actual boundary, he considered, where semi-light transitions to semi-dark, a line that can be calculated.  He lifted his pen again, then set it down without using it.  On the top left corner of his parchment, there was a small black spider that was moving and he watched as it walked smoothly and approached the solitary sentence.

“I can’t think now, little spider.  You’re distracting me,” the man said.  The spider looked up, perhaps comprehending, but it didn’t leave.  It rubbed its front legs together like it was washing.  The man picked up his pen and placed its tip directly in front of the spider and, with his other hand, he gently pushed it and encouraged it to climb on, and, when the spider was in place, he bent over and brushed it lightly off the pen and onto the floor, then he straightened again and looked at his sentence and then looked at the top left corner of the parchment where the spider had impossibly returned.

“Please, spider,” the man said, “I’m trying to be kind.”  The man used his pen again and maneuvered it under the spider less gently, then he picked it up and bent to the floor and flicked it off.  “I don’t want to harm you,” he said.  “Please leave me in peace.”  The man sat back up and looked outside at the lessening semi-lightness or increasing semi-darkness and the spider appeared again on the parchment and walked down to the sentence and stopped at the final word and remained motionless. 

Groaning, the man stood and lifted the parchment and walked to the door of his little room and opened it and flicked at the spider so that it fell to the ground, then he closed the door and returned to his chair and sat down and placed the parchment in front of him and watched as the spider crawled back to the sentence and stopped at the final word.

“I can’t just kill you,” the man said, “it’s not my nature.”  He looked around his small room and considered his thin bed and his little table.  On the table was a glass jar half-filled with water and inside the jar were two flowers.

Groaning louder, the man stood again and walked to the table and removed the flowers from the jar and dropped them to the floor, then carefully lifted the jar and returned to his desk and placed it down.

“Maybe this will teach you, little spider,” the man said.  He picked up the parchment and tipped it sideways over the opening of the jar and brushed the spider into the water where it landed on the surface and floated.

With hesitation, the man sat down and looked at his sentence again and recognized, blaming his recent distraction, that he was still no closer to understanding the line between semi-lightness and semi-darkness but his thought was interrupted by movement in the jar and the growing of the spider.  He watched as its size increased and its head became bulbous and its legs lengthened and began to fold awkwardly and press against the glass interior.  It looked at the man and he saw desperation and sadness in its face and he didn’t know what to do.  The spider was too big now to be removed from the jar and, the man surmised, smashing the glass would probably kill it.  He watched as it continued to swell and then, when there was no more room in the jar, it stopped growing and it didn’t move again. 

The man stared at the jar and then looked at his sentence on the parchment and considered his interaction with the spider and the morality of his choices and the event’s tragic conclusion.  “Today I became semi-dark,” he confessed to himself.  “Now I know.”

Chris Klassen

Image by Erik Karits from Pixabay – Cute little spider posing for the camera – brown and gold with excessive legs allowance on a light coloured background.