The Perfectionist, or, The Architect Recycles Her Edible Structure

Bartleby threw up all over the floor last night. At least she was considerate enough to do it on the tiles just outside my brother's room and not on his bed or rug. She'd been acting kind of standoffish the day before, not wanting to be touched at all and I think feeling ill may have had something to do with that. She also drank inordinate amounts of water and just before the incident was doing laps through the kitchen and living room which I now surmise meant, "Let me out, quick! I'm a gonna barf!" I'll know better next time. For the record and considering the sheer volume I had to clean, I believe the cat is hollow.

Afterward, that is, I after I cleaned up all the evidence and she'd had a chance to eat again, she became very friendly, crawling up into my chair and sleeping in my lap for two hours.

Which is not the actual story but merely the lead-in.

As I was walking out to the trash with my hazardous waste bag, I bumped into a spider web. Now, this is a frequent occurrence there being a persistent little arachnid constantly stringing strands between my car and the orange tree. Actually, what I collided with was the lower of two horizontal guy wires about three feet apart, a thick strand, twine as opposed to thread, forehead high, stretched across the walkway from the garage to the oak, a good seven feet long and taking some (slight but noticeable) effort to snap. Snap it I did and when I looked up the bottom third of the web had swung up and was stuck to the middle with a large brown spider tangled up in between.

I felt bad about that but it was dark, even with the walkway lights on, and the web hadn't been there four hours ago when I'd come home. I was hoping, since it was a beautiful web, regular and symmetrical (until I collided with it), that the spider would rebuild it, but, when I went back out to look a couple of hours later (around 10:30 or so) only the top supporting cable was left, and this morning even that was gone.

It seems like a lot of silk to eat, but then, it was a lot of silk to spin in the first place. I presume she'll try again someplace else with traffic more appropriately sized to her abilities.