I turned back around. Conditioner dripped from my hair into my eyes. Blinded, and with a cold-blooded killer in the room. That was it. My life was over. I furiously tried to rub the conditioner out of my burning, useless eyes. The spider was preparing to strike, to sink its poisonous fangs into my skin, I knew it. I was history—and only at eighteen, with so much life ahead of me! I blinked the last of the conditioner from my eyes so that I might at least see the last moments of my life with some clarity. I saw that those last moments did not belong to me, but to someone else. There was the spider, its perennial struggle ended. It had been caught by a drop of water—just one drop. It had drowned in an arbitrary drip, a chaotic puddle no bigger than the nail of my pinky toe. Think of all the drops of water falling right now: A storm barraging the cobblestoned sidewalks of London, a sprinkler spinning on an elderly neighbor’s lawn, a splash from a cannonball in a
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