When I stepped into the shower Wednesday morning, I spotted a small mark on the wall against the white tiles, in the corner, above where the soap rests on the edge of the tub.  I turned on the water and let it run into the tub for a moment, feeling with my hand for the water to turn hot.  When it did, I pulled the lever on the spout and took a step back as the stream switched to the shower over head.

            The water felt good.  I wet my head with my eyes closed, rubbing my scalp, then turned toward the other end of the shower and opened my eyes, eyeing again the small mark on the white tile above the soap.  I leaned over to investigate.

            A pale, delicate spider nestled between the first and second row of square white tiles above the rim of the tub.  The tile was likely too polished for it to grasp, so it clung fastly to the line of grout between the tiles, in the corner where the long side of the shower met the back.

            If the mark had been a spot of dirt or a smudge of soap, I had thought I would direct the water to wash it away, but now, seeing the spider, I moved carefully to protect it.

            I finished my shower.  The spider hadn’t moved. I dried myself with a towel, stepped out of the tub, wrapped the towel around my waist and thought what to do with the spider.  Lodged in the corner it would be difficult to trap beneath a glass.  From the toilet paper roll, I tore a single sheet of paper turned to kneel on the edge of the tub, and gingerly held out a corner of the toilet paper square beneath the spider.

            It responded to the advance by retreating a few millimeters up the grout, but, without much bother, I was able to coax it on to the toilet paper and lift it away from the wall.  Quickly, then, as the spider began to crawl and I didn’t want it on me, so small, so delicate, almost translucent, I wondered if it were perhaps newly hatched, I carried the toilet paper and the spider crawling on it to the window that I had opened when I first came into the bathroom in order to vent the steam from the shower, and held the toilet paper out the window and released it from my hand from my bathroom window on the eighth floor.

            The paper square drifted in the air, descending slowly, sailing laterally first out, away from the building, and then in, towards the building.  The air kept it aloft, like a sail.  I hoped that the paper would carry its passenger into a large tree below my window.  For a time, it seemed it might land closer to the building itself on a concrete walkway, which would not be as beneficial for the spider I imagined.  But then the white paper sailed outward again, and the square, I couldn’t see the spider but assumed it was still there, landed on a cushion of light green leaves near the top of the tree.

            I was pleased.

            I shaved, finished in the bathroom, dressed in sweatpants and a tee shirt because I wouldn’t need to leave for the cemetery for another hour and I would be uncomfortable sitting in my dress clothes.

            I made coffee.  I ate two pieces of toast.  I read the newspaper online.

            After an hour I changed out of my sweatpants and put on a white dress shirt, the most somber tie I own held down with a black tie clip, my grey suit.  It was to be a graveside service, so, although the sky was overcast I reasoned it would likely clear and be hot and sunny by the time the service began, I took my grey felt hat.

            The drive took forty minutes or so.  I was one of the first to arrive and the two people who were there before me I didn’t know.

            My friend had died a little over two months earlier after a long decline from cancer.  Her husband had likewise died from cancer four and a half years before her.  Now, both of their urns were to be placed in the ground in a memorial garden at the cemetery.

            We sat in folding chairs.  There were only a dozen of us.  They had been childless by choice.  My friend had no siblings.  Her husband had only a half-sister who he had not been close to.  She was the only family member present, the rest of us friends, work colleagues, a neighbor.  The minister spoke of the couple’s love for each other and how they would be forever connected now in the manner that all creation is connected in the being of God.

            The sun shown.  We sang, “There is more love somewhere” in tentative voices.  The minister closed with a Psalm.  Then two men from the cemetery arrived to open the niche in the ground and place the two urns inside together:  a white vase with purple irises painted on the side for my friend, I assumed she choose it herself, for her husband:  a square wooden box.  The workers closed the top of the niche, covered it in mulch, then set a large stone on top.  In a few weeks they would attach a plaque to the stone with the two names and dates.

            I drove home but stopped at a stationary store.  I had received word only that week that another friend had also died recently, a more distant friend who I had known for many years but had moved out of the state some time ago and I hadn’t seen recently.  I wanted to send a card to his widow.

            I bought the card and drove home.

            Now it was mid-afternoon, I changed out of my dress clothes, hanging the white shirt back on the hanger I had taken it from that morning.  It could wear another day without washing.  I wrote a message in the card and sealed and stamped the envelope.  Then I walked to the post office.

            I stopped at the library on the way.  I’ve been reading Faulkner, lately.  I read Absalom, Absalom! And then The Sound and the Fury.  I wanted to read As I Lay Dying next, which I had read before, in college, but as I scanned the shelves of classics separated from the popular fiction, I also found Faulkner’s Sanctuary, which I hadn’t read, and The Mill on the Floss (I had read Middlemarch a year ago) and a Saul Bellow I hadn’t read, Humboldt’s Gift.  I asked the clerk if it were OK to borrow four books, knowing that I couldn’t read them all immediately.

            She said I could check out up to thirty!  So I had to laugh at that and left with my four.

            I walked to the post office and mailed the card.  The sun was bright, now, and hot.

            I returned to my apartment from the opposite side that I had left earlier to go the library.  As I approached the building I came near the large tree below my apartment window.  Laying on the grass beneath the tree was the white square of toilet paper I had dropped into the tree now blown down by the breeze.  I walked across the grass and picked it up:  clean, white, and no evidence of the spider.  I slipped the paper inside the front cover of one of my books, meaning to carry it upstairs and dispose of it in the trash.

            In my apartment, I set the stack of books on the coffee table.

            It was now late afternoon.  I hadn’t eaten anything since the toast I’d had that morning so I made myself dinner.  I browsed the internet while I ate.  There was war in the Middle East.  Then I cleared my place, started the dishwasher, poured a glass of bourbon into a favorite glass, and settled in my chair to read.

            I found the square of toilet paper, along with the receipt the library prints when you check out books, inside the cover of As I Lay Dying so I started with that.  I read of Darl describing Cash sawing on the boards for Addie Bundren’s coffin as she lies, dying but not yet dead, in the house.  How the family goes about its business of living even as she dies.  How when she dies, death is just another incident of the day and then there’s something different to do, but also just something to do as always.

            I finished my drink and used the piece of toilet paper to mark my place then set the book on the coffee table and took the empty glass to the kitchen.  Because the dishwasher was running, I meant to set the glass in the sink, but then, fumbling, I hadn’t turned on the light in the kitchen, I misjudged the bottom of the sink and set the glass down hard and it shattered in my hand.  A delicate glass.  It had belonged to my mother.  Four of them but I’d long ago broken one.  Now there would be two.

            I turned on the kitchen light.  The sink was filled with glass shards surrounding the mostly intact, thicker, base. Carefully, I lifted the delicate shards, setting them in the palm of my left hand and then carrying them to the trash.  It took several trips and a careful eye to make sure I removed all the glass.

            When I finished, I noticed that the index finger on my right hand was bleeding, not badly, but seeing the blood.  I washed my hands.  Going back to my chair and picking up the novel again, I saw that blood had continued to come, so I took the square of toilet paper from the book and pressed it against the cut.  A small, irregular circle of blood marked the paper.  I folded the paper down and pressed it hard against the finger until the blood stopped flowing leaving only a delicate slightly red line across the pad of my finger.

            I read another few chapters, and then, whether it was the bourbon, or having been out in the sun for much of the afternoon, I began to feel tired earlier than usual and decided to go to bed.

            I used the library receipt as a bookmark and carried the bloodied piece of toilet paper to the trash.  When I released it, it settled down atop the clear broken glass.

            The bathroom was cold.  I closed the window.  I brushed my teeth and took my pills.  I undressed to boxer shorts and slid into the bed.  The white sheets felt cool and rough against my skin.

            I fell asleep quickly and began to dream.  I was sailing in a small sailboat.  It was night.  I had my hand on the tiller.  The sail, big and white, spread before me, shining in the moonlight.  The water was dark below, but in the clear water I could see shapes moving:  silvery fish and eels, making delicate swirling patterns as the swam.  I glided along the water peacefully, the sail full of wind, the fish and eels accompanying me.

            And then, the sea fell away below me, as though I had sailed off the corner of the earth, but I sailed on, now through clear air, as peaceful as before.

            Far in the distance, across a long expanse of empty space, I saw a scattered cluster of bright stars.  I sailed toward them.  One, in particular, twinkled at me.