The Spider Story

Certain individuals involved in the Saturday night Skype conversation of the WGCC area already familiar with this story. But, it's funny. So I don't care.

Saturday, I was feeling gross. As I tried to avoid throwing up for the thousandth day in a row, I looked across my room and saw...IT.

A spider, easily the size of my hand, stared back at me. It twitched its slender little spider-legs.

Naturally, I did what any girl with a younger brother (or older, I suppose) would do.

"PAUL!" I called. He came. Paul does that.

"It's looking at me," I said. "It wants to eat my eyes right out of their sockets!" I then pointed at the floor by Paul's feet.

"What?"

"There!" I said. "By the door frame! Get your SHOES."

Paul got his shoes. He does that, too.

By this point, the spider was onto my plan. He skittered around the corner to hide behind my door. Then, Paul returned with The Shoe.

What followed was the most pathetic attempt at spider-killing I have ever seen. That spider totally saw him coming. It raced around the door and scuttled under my dresser. My oak dresser. The one that weighs 4000 pounds.

"Looks like you have a new friend," Paul said.

"This is your fault!" I insisted. "We have to get him. He's going to wait for me to sleep so that he can come and eat my face. He'll eat it right off!"

"The spider isn't going to eat your face, Laura," Paul sighed.

Clearly, he was wrong. He had not seen the venomous look on the spider's face. I had. Plus, his legs were, like, longer than my fingers! That spider was easily as big as my head!

"I know!" I announced, grabbing the shoe. Lying on my stomach, I could see the spider looking back at me from under the dresser. I shoved Paul's shoe under the dresser. It didn't so much fit.

I darted across the room, grabbed my longest knitting needles, and tried to use it to herd the spider out from under the dresser. I think I saw it roll its eyes. There was no other choice.

I single-handedly moved the giant dresser, while Paul, still attempting to explain to me that the spider was "hiding because it's afraid" and "unable to tell you have a face" and "not interested in eating human flesh," looked on.

The spider, now in the open, tried once more to flee. I smacked it repeatedly with THIS magazine, which I had purchased earlier in the week because I'd seen Easy A with Jennifer and think Emma Stone would make an awesome Clary, should Hollywood make Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments series into movies.

IT. WOULD. NOT. DIE.

Now trapped in a battle of wills, the spider and I wrestled for survival. Finally, I hurled Paul's Shoe onto the spider, grabbed him, and forced him to stomp the shoe until the spider had expired.

We were safe.

I would wake up with my nose, eyelids, cheekbones, lips, and chin all where they had been when I'd gone to sleep. Why wouldn't I wake up were a spider to start eating me? Venom, that's why. They can numb things. Ask Bilbo and the dwarves.

Paul disposed of Shelob. Then I started to wonder...

Had the spider really been afraid of me? Paul said it was. And it had been hiding. Maybe it had a spider family, and when it got home from work, it would put on a tiny waistcoat with eight arm holes and dozens of little buttons all down the front, with a smart little cap it wore on it's head. Or maybe it was a Mommy Spider, who had tea parties and wore an eight-armed dress with a little mob cap! Maybe it's thousands of little spider babies were all waiting quietly for Mommy to come home, and she NEVER WOULD.*

At that point, I began to cry.

And that is my Spider Story.

*It might bear mentioning that I spent the remainder of the night throwing up again and again and again, once every hour, as punishment from God for destroying Mommy Spider and leaving her children to starve.