I sit on the toilet. It is a wonderous place, a place for relaxation, revelation and relief. My pants are around my ankles, my bowels are heaving, and a tiny spider appears on the tiled floor in front of me. Where did it come from? Perhaps from a crack in the corner, perhaps from underneath the (near-empty) toilet-paper basket. Wherever it's from, it's there. It seems to stare at me as I stare at it, its eight legs are splayed out in such a way that makes me wish I had more limbs. Suddenly and with apparent determination, it scurries towards my socked foot, I am somewhat afraid. Why am I afraid? It's tiny, no bigger than one of the holes in a button, and it keeps moving towards me.

The end of my belt is lying on the floor, I try to use it to scare the spider away. As my belt touches the spider it curls into a ball, something I've never seen a spider do before. Are spiders meant to do that? Did I kill it? I certainly didn't mean to kill it. I look away, staring at the wall in front of me; and when I look back, the spider is back to its old form. Did it uncurl itself, or was it never curled up in the first place? Either way, I feel ashamed to be around it, its stare is more than I can bare. I blow my breath towards it, and what must seem to it a great gust of wind sweeps it into the corner of the room, behind the toilet-paper basket.

What if it comes back? Hold on, I almost forgot: I have the tiniest hand grenade in the world. Clipped to my breast-pocket, it hangs delicately and moves with my breathing; it is tiny and black, just like the spider. I always keep the tiniest hand grenade in the world just in case, and now I need it. "When are you ever going to need such a tiny hand grenade?", people always ask me; "I don't know, but I think I just might one day", I always reply. I was right, it is my tiny saviour. With my forefinger and my thumb I gently pluck it from my shirt, and hold it close to my eye. Was it forged en masse by tiny blacksmiths, or was it meticulously chiseled by a master armourer? I arm my little device and lob it into the corner of the room, right where the spider lurks in the shadows.

The tiniest explosion resounds throughout the room, no louder than the plop of one of my bowel movements. Itty-bitty pieces of shrapnel fly out from the epicentre of the blast, they bounce off the walls with a satisfying clatter. One of them flies directly towards me and is embedded in my eyelid, not even scraping the surface of the eye itself. I smile at the pain, knowing that my eight-legged friend feels no pain any more. Gently I pull the metal from my face, it is like a piece of broken seashell. Wondering how everyone will react to the cracked and blackened tile in the corner, I sit and pick my teeth with the pin from the tiniest hand grenade in the word.