Leaky Buckets

There is nothing worse than a spider with superpowers. It started out as just a normal spider, or so I thought. I was lying in my tent, deep inside my sleeping bag, head propped up on a pile of extra clothes that I had shaped into a pillow. My headlamp dangled from the ceiling, casting angular shadows into the corners where my worldly possessions were stacked around me like a fortress. I was halfway through Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the third time, plodding through the part where he is in Bozeman visiting friends. I was trying to suss out landmarks from my college days, but it was slightly too vague. My shoulder was aching from an hour of leaning awkwardly over, so I flopped down onto my back, and looked up at the ceiling. And that is when I saw the spider, descended about halfway down from the ceiling towards me and my book on a string of web line, a la Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.  The best reaction would have been to do nothing, because being afraid of a sil