The forever cliché,You can’t trust (fill in the blank), is cliché for a reason. Because for many, it’s true. And what happens when the blank is filled with so many persons and entities that the untrustworthiness of the world overwhelms a person?

It happened to Henry, beginning with his divorce, from which he developed a severe mistrust of women. It continued when his job was eliminated by AI, a double blow that fueled his distrust of corporate America and modern technology.

No one can be trusted. It’s a flaw in human biology; that’s the way Henry sees it. It’s a flaw compounded by another: humans want to trust. We can’t help ourselves. It’s an itch we can’t help but scratch. Henry overcame this flaw by turning his itch over to a most unlikely scratcher—a spider.
Simple, brown and harmless, a common brown house spider which had managed to remain healthy and secluded in its garage abode, two feet above the creaky articulating door.

Perhaps it was Henry’s old nostalgia over the story of Charlotte’s Web that made it so easy to converse with the creature. Whatever the reason, this spider began as adopted pet, advanced to confidant, and elevated to Henry’s trusted advisor in the span of a few months.

It happened that Henry awoke one night with a lancing pain in his abdomen. Unwilling to overlook his well earned mistrust of all things technological, he did not consult the likes of Dr. Google, WebMD, nor the notorious keyboard experts over at Reddit. He did not rush to the emergency room, for the doctors therin (as many know) are mere servants to the pharmaceutical crooks.

Instead, he sought the advise of his trusted garage spider, which told him through some mystical connection of the mind, to pour salt on it. So Henry did. He poured salt on it and in it. He ingested as much salt as he could, and when he could force himself to swallow no more, he dumped the rest on his head. Then he collapsed and died.

When emergency services arrived days later, they found him prone on the floor of his garage, a decomposing nest to a family of spiders.