Some of you may have noticed that I made no mention of the toilet ants this year. I attribute this to the bathroom spider.
This spring, I braced myself for the ants’ annual invasion, but to my astonishment, apart from a few scouting parties that were quickly dispatched, the raid never came. I eventually discovered a tiny spider that had taken up residence in the corner behind the door. I suspected that corner to be the source of the attack, so I decided to let the little guy stay.
Sure enough, before long he had amassed a collection of half a dozen or so balled up little ant carcasses, which he kept in a neat little formation on the ground near his web as a deterrent to all comers, similar, I imagine, to a warlord putting his enemies’ heads on pikes. I thought it was a little gauche, frankly, but he was pretty young and obviously had yet to develop any interior design sense. I humored him for a while, but eventually I swept up the carcasses, and the ants never returned. My newfound little buddy had successfully scared them all off.
The little guy was so tiny that, from any of the, um, common vantage points of the bathroom, as long as he kept in his corner you really couldn’t even see him. I’ve never really had a fear of creepy crawlies, so I didn’t feel the need to chase him out. After a while, though, bathroom spider got a hankering to see the sights in other parts of the bathroom, which I figured was only his right, after all he’d done for me. I decided to leave him alone as long as he adhered to my rules. One rule, really. Stay out of my way. I mentally vowed that if I ever caught bathroom spider chilling on or near an object that I needed to actually use right then, he would have to die. (Obvious caveat: nowhere near my toothbrush, at all, ever.)
For the most part, he’s been pretty good about it. He seemed to like the ceiling corner of the shower and the underneath of the toilet paper stand. I mostly ignored him, and he mostly ignored me, barely bothering to hide at my approach.
Lately, though, he’s been getting a little cavalier about this arrangement. A couple weeks ago, for example, I felt a slight tickle on the back of my leg. I brushed it off, and bathroom spider tumbled to the ground and bolted for the shadows behind the toilet before I could react.
“Dude!” I yelled into the porcelain catacombs. “Not cool!”
He never tried that again. It’s good to set boundaries in a relationship.
I really need to have a talk with him, though, because he’s getting, well, kind of fat, and kind of lazy, and it’s becoming a problem. Like yesterday morning, when I wanted to take a shower, and he was just chilling in the tub.
“Look, BS,” I warned him (our relationship is pretty casual at this point), “you gotta move, or you’re gonna get washed down the drain.”
He didn’t listen, so, shaking my head in a very I-told-you-so manner, I turned on the tap, expecting to shortly be playing taps for him. To my surprise, BS was now fat enough to withstand the onslaught of water. With great effort, he slogged himself out of the main current and sat ankle deep (his ankle) in water, pouting.
Fine, I thought, turning on the shower head, certain it would spell his doom. As a wave swept him away, he managed to cling with one leg to the side of the tub, and started to climb. Out of respect for his determination, I let him try. To my amazement, he managed to work his way around all the comparatively huge water droplets, occasionally losing his footing on the slippery wet porcelain but always recovering, until he made it to the rim of the tub and retreated behind the shower curtain to sulk.
It weighs on you when your relationship hits a rough patch, you know? I fretted off and on all day that I’d irreparably damaged our relationship and he was at home laying eggs on my toothbrush or lying in wait on the lens of my glasses or the back of the toilet paper roll. So it was a huge relief to get home and discover that there were no hard feelings, and BS has learned his lesson and is attempting to make up for it by behaving like a gentleman.
He held the door for me when I went to brush my teeth.
Time to start charging rent.
Laura Writes 
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