TRAP

by Vincent Daemon

The memory came back slowly.

It lay there, under the bush.

The morsel (or feast, as it were) had somehow remained undetected by the others.

He spied it greedily. A warm, humid evening had long fallen, yet his vision was still tiptop.

Homing in, going into hunger-fueled overdrive...heroically, the champion zooming in for the catch.

Being a scavenger is such a thrill.

That's when he felt the net.

He had been too eager, too hasty, and couldn't see the near-invisible stitching in the twilit gloom.

It had great elasticity and he struggled hard against the sticky strands, exerting too much energy.

Exhaustion set in quickly, and he recoiled back, as if in some bungee-jump mishap.

He knew then that he'd been caught in the trap.

Panic gripped his body tight, into a statuesque stillness. No, not this...

The injection of the poison was unexpected, and after an agonizing bout of convulsive paralysis, the blackout set in.

He came to, hazily, realizing that a straightjacket of that adhesive sinew enwrapped his body tight.

Claustrophobia was setting in.

This vile menace, his captor, lurched tauntingly forward along the intricate strands of thorax-ejaculate with a steadied and perfect Olympian grace.

Four black death-eyes stared coldly down in stoic superiority.

Its pinpointed, razorsharp maw widened with sick arachnoid glee.

He wanted to flee.

Both wings and all six of his legs had been so awfully confined. Didn't matter, though; he still couldn't feel them anyway.

But would he feel his inevitable exsanguination?

All he could do was watch it through the stark terror of his ninety-six eyes.

As the slow, sadistic execution and feeding began, his final thought was quite simple:

All this for a dog turd.