Come to me my dear. You will come to New Orleans at once. You must come. In fact—you WILL come. With not a second to waste. For she was hungry once again.

I've watched you for awhile now, and at last you are ready. Since he was a young child I have watched him closely. From his youth, adolescence and young adulthood. An exceptional young man he had become despite the battles with his inner turmoil that cursed him from when he was a child. I stood at the edge of his bed. I watched him sleep. A little tiny fly caught in the web, and he'd have to wait before the spider had come down to relieve him from his entanglement, his hunger, and then finitely, his little tiny will to live. I watched the insects of my mothers garden get snatched by prey, but most of the time it was drawn out. I can remember the prickly grass that poked me like tiny needles, red chiggers crawled from their blades and latched onto my smooth skin. I watched them, they buried themselves just under the dermal layer, they made me itch, a lot. Almost relentlessly. I'd scratch and I'd scratch, and I even scratched some more. I smashed them with my finger tips into my arms and legs, their little tiny lives smeared across the surface of my body. Gone in an instant. I never stopped to think if they had loved ones such as us, instead they'd never return home. And those that loved them, waited. They waited a long time, sometimes only seconds. Sometimes days. Maybe sometimes, the rest of their little tiny lives. Which was likely short in their span. Unfortunately, of course. But if there never was an end, would it ever taste so sweet?

Then she finally crept out of her tunneled web, cautiously. On all eight legs, slowly as she approached her prey. One step at a time, it started with her front right leg. Then the front left, as her legs moved in a crescendo played by a pianist at the show of their lifetime. Rehearsed, after all she had done this many times before. It was her means to survival, it was never anything out of spite. It was simply nature, and the storm always provided.

I could see in slow motion the neurons that passed through her nervous system to her cephalothorax that controlled her little tiny spider legs. Each one finely danced on the web. Her home, a throne of bones and trapped souls. Each one, finely pointed like the tip of a sharp pencil that was chiseled perfectly by the shiny silver serrated sharpener. She was cold in her live performance, ice cold. The wind was silent as it slowly passed through the web, it flowed gracefully in the air while attached to the stems of the recently bud chrysanthemum. A flower for his funeral, already prepared. She wrapped him ferociously in a beautifully threaded silk ball of web. Her fangs from her chelicerae, thirsty for blood. They penetrated her prey's shell, crushing its little tiny skull. She devoured it. First, she snapped apart its little tiny head and fed on its brainless shell. Second, she dug her front two legs, with near surgical precision — similarly to a doctor that has to carefully sew the last stitch into a transplant patient's beating heart or he will die if he fails, into its little tiny intestines. And she ripped him to shreds. And then I thought how long its loved ones would wander the earth about their days as they wondered whatever happened to their little tiny friend. Sometimes they wondered for days. Maybe sometimes, they'd wonder for the rest of their lives.

But he was just a young boy. And now he is ready. And to New Orleans he would come. For she was hungry once again.

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