Theft by Finding - David Sedaris

July 18, 2002
La Bagotière
Yesterday afternoon Paula, the big female Tegenaria in my office, took down a bumblebee, which
fought briefly, realized the situation was futile, and surrendered. I’d caught it earlier in the garden and
afterward felt terrible. A wasp is one thing, but bumblebees don’t hurt anyone. Like ladybugs, they’re
all about love. After Paula killed it, I looked in the mirror, expecting to see a monster staring back at
me. I mean, I really felt changed, ashamed of myself for catching this thing and throwing it into her
web. “This is it,” I told myself. “No more feeding the spiders.” Then I rode my bike to Flers, bought a
magnifying glass and a book about insects, and came home to feed the spiders.
July 22, 2002
La Bagotière
This is just about the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen: Yesterday afternoon I threw Paula an
exceptionally large fly I’d caught in the kitchen. She took it into her cave and a few hours later I
noticed her standing in the middle of her web, surrounded by maggots. I’m not sure quite how this
happened, as they emerge from eggs, not live from the mother, whose dead body was now crawling
with them. Maybe she’d been looking for a place to lay them and they’d hatched a little sooner than
she thought? When she’d finished with the fly, Paula started in on the maggots, not eating them but
carrying them to the edge of the web and tossing them onto the floor. It was a nasty job and after a
while she gave up.
I took a nap and when I returned, the web was covered with ants, who carried the maggots past
Paula’s cave and through a crack in the door. It was as if they were servants she had hired to clean up
after a party. Manuela was here, and late in the afternoon Genevieve stopped by. The Gs invited us
over for aperitifs, and while the others discussed this and that, I thought of the web full of maggots. It
was like a terrible secret that set me apart from normal happy people who could eat peanuts and make
jokes. I thought about them some more on the way to the train station and by the time Manuela left, I
was sick to my stomach.
July 24, 2002
La Bagotière
While I was at the roundabout in Flers, a child approached me and asked for a cigarette. He was
maybe eight. “It’s for my mother,” he said. I asked where his mom was and he gestured behind
himself. “At home.”
Later, riding to La Lande-Saint-Siméon, I passed a swastika spray-painted onto the road.
I finished An Obedient Father by Akhil Sharma. The novel’s main character, Ram, is a corrupt
bureaucrat who raped his daughter when she was young and wouldn’t mind doing the same to the