The Circle of Life Outside My Bathroom Window
When about to go in for my shower this evening, I saw a pale shape fluttering against the fogged glass of the bathroom window. It was the wrong shape for a moth, (the thing usually attracted to the window at night) so out of curiosity I opened the window to see what it was. And what it was, was a praying mantis caught in the web of a black widow. The spider was darting in and out, attempting to wrap up this prey that was twice its size even though widows are not small spiders; and the mantis was struggling to free itself, gnawing at the webbing with its mandibles. The mantis, too, was not the typical green nor the typical brown, but a sort of pale grass-yellow with deep red eyes and light green wings. Seeing that it seemed already weakened by venom and not wishing therefore to deprive the widow of its hard-won meal, I closed the window and let her get on with her business. After my shower I looked again to see how it had all gone down: the mantis was trussed up like a turkey and quite dead, and the widow had even hauled it higher up the window frame as if it were hanging it in a meat locker.