THE spider dangled above the table.
It was a large table in a busy restaurant, but it was wedged into the dimmest corner, and the spider’s web was strung between the curls of an old wrought-iron chandelier that no one ever remembered to dust.
A family sat at the table below: three grandparents, an aunt and uncle, a mother and father, and a child who was exactly four years old.
The spider positioned herself above the child’s chair. She waited there, watching, her eyes glittering like the bumps on a wet blackberry.
When several waiters trooped into the corner, carrying a special little cake with four burning candles on top, the spider inched a bit farther down her thread. The waiters and the family all sang and cheered.
“Make a wish!” said one of the grandmothers.
The child huffed out the candles.
Everybody cheered again.
And in that moment, while everybody was smiling and clapping and getting ready to slice the cake, something rose up into the air on a spinning wisp of candle smoke.
The spider caught it. It was what she had been waiting for.
She bundled it up into a ball of strong, gluey thread. Then she scuttled across the ceiling to the nearest window and wedged herself through the gap above the sill, dragging the bundle behind her.
Outside, a gust of cool evening air swept over her, making her clutch the restaurant’s brick wall with six legs. But she didn’t lose her grip on the bundle. Once the gust had passed, she lowered it slowly, carefully, toward the sidewalk.
A gray pigeon hopped down from its perch on a street sign. It glided below the restaurant window, snipped the spider’s thread with its beak, and flapped away up the twilit street, the bundle dangling under it like a tiny broken pendulum.
The pigeon landed on the shoulder of a woman in a long black coat. The woman held up one hand. The pigeon dropped the bundle into it. The woman tucked the bundle safely into one of the coat’s many pockets.
Then the woman turned and strode off into the shadows with the pigeon still perching on her shoulder, and the spider squeezed back through the window gap, and nobody noticed the small, strange, terribly important thing that had just happened.
That’s the thing about small things.
They’re very easy to miss.
This makes small things dangerous.
Germs. Thumbtacks. Spiders—both the black widows that lurk under rotting woodpiles, and the patient, watchful ones that live in the chandeliers of old Italian restaurants.
Most of us don’t spot them until it’s too late.
So it’s a good thing for us that someone else—someone quiet and sharp-eyed, and also very easy to miss—is always keeping watch.