Baffled

The house spider was on the inside & didn’t budge when the phoebe flew up & clung to the window screen, jabbing fruitlessly at a meal turned to metal — or rather, subdivided into orderly impenetrable holes, as in a physics textbook account of the structure of matter. Chalk lines on a blackboard, rows of blank faces at their desks. But it was right there — the spider, the phoebe, the rattle of wings.