Damn Vegetarian

The little girl brushed her greasy hair from her greasy face with her equally greasy fingertips. Gross. Her fingers looked like big, fat, delicious Polish sausages. Just as thoughts of cannabilistic cravings surfaced, she decided she would become a vegetarian. Which was quite funny, because just yesterday, she had coddled herself in the interpretation of vegetarians as idealistic, superficial saps. But now. It was different. OH, how different it was.

Her fingers were not fragile and beautiful like the ones she saw on the little Russian ballerinas in the golden music boxes or the girlish Victorian debutante piano players. Maybe becoming a vegetarian would help her become beautiful. Maybe making herself littler and weaker would make the things she managed to do right seem grander.

"It's an illusion."

A small spider resting at the tip of the little girl's mud-splattered shoe hopped onto her knee, then onto her blue cotton dress, landing right above her left breast. "I said it's an illusion. It's not that great being delicate and beautiful. It's kind of lonely actually, everyone just kind of forgets about you."

"But look at all the things you can do! You can fall a distance one hundred and one times your height and still live. You can kill an opponent fifty times your size with one bite. And BY golly, would you please get off my chest? It's making me rather uncomfortable."

The spider scuttled up the little girl's neck and onto her eyelid. She was very careful to keep her eye closed or risk accidentally trapping the spider in the crevice above her eye.

"Do you think the size of my achievements matters to me? I'm just a spider. That's what I don't understand about you humans. Everything is revolved around flattery, flattery, flattery! What happens when you die and everyone forgets about you? What happens when you die and you realize that you and I, spider and human, intellectual and bastard, we're all the same? Will it matter then?"

The little girl hesitated for a moment and closed both eyes. She felt the little spider hop down from her face onto the ground.

"I guess it won't. Unless there's some kind of afterlife. Then it would matter to me. Because. I'd want to be immortalized by what I accomplished while I was alive. I don't want to be remembered by my fat fingers or my greasy hair. I want to leave a legacy. Is that wrong? Is it wrong to want to be remembered? How else will dwarf and giant be distinguished? Now THAT's a scary thought, what happens to us when we die. Do we vanish like vapor into the air? Do we swim among the stars like particles of ambiguity? Do we lose all sense of feeling? Maybe we're all just insignificant vessels of flesh attempting to find something that means something to us, be someone who means something to someone. Maybe we're trapped in a puppet's body, controlled by an inexplicable worldly force and unable to escape. OH, I don't know. What do you think?"

Eyes still shut, the little girl awaited a response from her new friend. She waited for a long time, but was embraced by silence.

Growing impatient, she opened her eyes.

The little spider lay dead on the floor.