The Day Lady Died

So, today my first "pet" since I've been living here, died. We can't have real pets, since the cottage is so small, but when about 5 common house spiders took up residence in between the window and storm window beside my bed, I watched them with great interest. Few bugs got in there, so I was convinced that they would starve to death. We didn't take any great notice until one day I found on the the spiders sucking on the corpse of a much larger spider, probably of a slightly different species. We didn't see the struggle, since it happened in the middle of the night, but I noticed a few days afterwards that she only had seven legs. She produced two egg sacs within a couple of weeks of each other, and somehow lost another leg. Everything stayed the same for a few weeks and she ate very little.

This morning, at around five o clock, I noticed that the two egg sacs were missing. She had dropped them from the web and moved over to another part of the window. There were 4 other spiders with her, two who were probably male, because after a while they developed different coloration. Going by color alone, then it seems that there were three females, the six-legged one, a healthy eight-legged one, and one that was whole, but never ate a single thing during its adult life, as far as I saw. The little starved one had also moved, down to the old corpse that had been dispatched months ago. It trussed it up in a web and was sucking out of it, I guess trying to get anything it could. Today when I came home, I looked in the window, and noticed two crumpled spider corpses, one of them very tiny, the other with six legs. The other "female" seems to be alive and well, just like the males. I really did consider the six-legged one to be my pet. I'll miss having her around, but her babies will be around next year.