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Spiders love my wife. Every time they come into our house, she traps them in a plastic cup and sets them free in the yard. The spiders think it’s the best thing ever: scurrying out from under a cup onto some grass, with no clue how they ended up there. For them, every such journey is an exodus, a transformation, a voyage from within to without, from civilization to nature, from bondage to freedom. I’m much less skilled than my wife, and although I’ve never perfected the art of capturing spiders, I am very good at stepping on them.

Spiders love my wife. In the spider kingdom, there’s a giant gold-plated statue of a plastic cup with my wife’s name engraved in large bold letters, and beneath that, in much smaller letters, the names of all the spiders whose lives she’s saved. In the spider kingdom, there is not a single statue bearing my name. Not even a statuette. The only thing I’ve ever given them is a quick death.

Spiders love my wife. When she dies, they will come to her funeral in the tens of thousands, like the disciples at a rabbi’s burial, and they will cover the cemetery in a giant puzzle made of millions of eight-legged pieces, each offering words of praise and lamentation for my wife. They will stand over her grave and delicately pluck on the harp strings they will have woven from their own silk, and they will sing Leonard Cohen and Pixies songs until evening falls. At my funeral, there will be poets and professors and, if I’m lucky, maybe a president or two. But you could turn over every stone in that cemetery and you still wouldn’t find a single spider.

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