My chest hurt, I stepped outside and walked toward town. The Zumbro River was frozen over, but I heard water by the bridge. The falls are tumbling brown from the limestone table, like a greasy comb of water in winter. It is starting to snow again, and Rachel is there, and takes my arm, and we return like married people, coughing frost in the quiet air. You do not know the struggle, you cannot know the cost until you have been tangled with tarantula and wasp.
Tarantula is power, a fearsome hairy ghost.
It meets its wily match in the black bottomed wasp. The spider fights for its life. The insect wants its corpse as a furry incubator for a hundred eggs of wasp. Live now or live later, a choice as old as Faust, enlivened by the anxious dance of tarantula and wasp. You know in an instant that the news will be painful.