When I was a kid my parents had a shower in the basement. It’s normal for my area, a lot of outdoor manual laborers back in the day so having a shower in the basement meant you could come home after work and not drag the stink and filth of work into the house. I didn’t do outdoor manual labor but I worked in restaurants, which brings with it its own stink and filth, and I also often got home at like 3am, so I used the basement shower om an effort to keep the house clean and not wake everyone else up. This meant that I had to establish something I called the Basement Spider Detente. We had tons of spiders down there, and I try to be respectful of everyone’s right to be alive absent any unwarranted aggression. The deal we reached was as follows: the entire basement and garage belonged to the spiders. They were free to roam, hunt, and generally spide however they saw fit. The shower was off-limits, though, and the penalty for coming within jumping distance of my naked bits was summary execution. I like to think that somewhere near Pittsburgh is a genetic line of cellar spiders that differ from the rest of their species in being extremely hydrophobic. I hope their line succeeds and confounds biologists in the centuries after I go to wherever it is we all must one day go.

But if you zoom in, they aren’t. It’s shadowss.