The Dangers of Unintended Symbolism

I don’t know what this means, but the spider who lived in my Emmy is dead.

I was walking past the fireplace and I looked at the mantel and I saw that an intricate web had been spun from the edge of the base to the globe. At the center was a small brown spider. I blew on the web and the spider plucked its way up along the silk to hide in the hollow globe held aloft by the Emmy Lady.

It’s supposed to be bad luck to kill a spider under the best of circumstances, so the potential trouble you could get from killing one living in an award you’ve been given was not something I wanted to explore. So I left the spider alone. I walked away trying not to play with the symbolism of cobwebs clinging to a symbol of my achievements.

A few days later, I looked again. The web was there, but it was powdered with dust and sagging in sections. On the mantel, just in front of the statue was the spider. Dead. On its back. It looked like a tiny, desiccated brown hand reaching up toward a golden idol shaped like a woman in a whispery gown.

The remains have been removed, the television goddess with the slightly tarnished wing-tips has been dusted. And I am left with a simple statement that sounds like a poorly translated haiku:

“The spider who lived in my Emmy is dead. I don’t know what that means.”