Spider Dance

Accidents happen so darn fast and so unpredictably. It's amazing the speed at which they occur.

One minute you're perfectly OK and feeling just fine and the next instant you can't remember a time when the traumatized area didn't throb with pain.

Moments before the injury our whole world was open, our horizons vast and our expectations and plans enormously suited to our expanding universe.

We were not aware, perhaps, that the world was our oyster. Still, it was there waiting for our participation.

Then, in less time than it takes a parrot to squawk, we are injured, our life changes, and all of our attention is localized to one miniscule area which on the scale of size would be too small to show up on a roadmap.

Heck. Even a greatly magnified roadmap which pinpoints individual houses, rooftops and bushes could not be enlarged enough to show such a minor injury.

There are, of course, injuries far more serious than a broken toe. Indeed, on the scale of importance a broken toe is no more than a mosquito's nibble. Swat it away and ignore its nuisance value.

A broken toe is like too much ketchup spilled on a hot dog. One moment the ketchup is stuck in the bottle and the next moment, whoops, the whole content of the bottle is oozing the length of the dog, up and over the sides of the bun, onto the plate, along the table's edge and into the lap of the only person present who would be really pissed off if ketchup landed in their lap. Such an incident would destroy their whole day.

The two are very similar experiences, except it takes longer to spill the ketchup.

It's not the pain of the toe that bothers me so much as the way the calamity happened.

Daylight hours are fraught with accident prone adventures but nights . . . ahhh nights . . . shouldn't the safety of our beds be sacrosanct?

At least, that's the way it usually works. One hits the mattress, pluffs up the pillows, pulls up the comforter, draws a deep, satisfied breath and thanks the Powers That Be for having survived yet another day.

Journalists often write in bed. Jotting down those last few thoughts before turning off the light and sometimes crumpling paper into wads, pitching them on the floor to be disposed of in the morning clean-up routine. Certainly, after an eighteen hour day, no one is going to get up, leave the comfort of bed, to dispose of those wastrel words properly.

Unless . . . .

Glancing over the edge of the mattress you spy a huge black spider perched atop a crumpled ball of paper. You eyeball the distance between the ominous creepy crawly and the low iron frame supporting the box spring and note that the malevolent spider is only a cobweb away from attacking you while you sleep. Alarms sound and you KNOW you are in mortal danger.

Galvanized into immediate action, you leap from the bed with the intention of kicking the ball-shaped paper across the room.

This action, if done quickly enough, will send that spider sailing like a football through the end zone and hopefully to perdition beyond.

There's only one thing that could go wrong with this game plan devised in less seconds than it takes to inhale. Your toe performs an improbable yet not impossible feat. It somehow gets trapped in the millimeter of space between the mattress and the metal frame. How could that happen?

Shucks. It all happened so fast. It was a sloppy fall. Ungainly. Nothing graceful about it at all. KaBam!

The spider? Skittered away as fast as his many legs would speed his escape. (We don't even want to see this from his point of view.)

And the toe? Well, if it's examined with a magnifying glass, I think it'll show up on the roadmap somewhere between Peoria and Lake Winnipesaukee.

Footnote: In an ideal world there would be no pain, no suffering. And accidents? If they happened at all, they would happen in slow motion, very slow motion, so there would be time to reverse the action and create a different outcome. An outcome which kept the world open, our horizons vast and our expectations and plans enormously suited to our expanding universe which is there . . . waiting for our participation.
Spider Dance © 2006 Chaeli Lee Sullivan