aubli

a spider that had taken up residence in the empty pop tarts box by the garbage can was in fact a black widow spider. fatespawn and i were taking out the trash, and it was raining; i was standing under the eaves with my arms full of boxes, waiting for the rain to slow and peering at the spider in the pop tarts box to pass the time. and lo, the spider had a red hourglass on its abdomen. when fatespawn came back, i confirmed that he, too, saw the hourglass, and then we went to toss it out. the spider make a break for it before we reached the dumpster, and so it was trod upon.

in second or third grade they showed us a documentary on black widows; it featured several people whose lives had been affected by the black widow’s bite. why they showed us this scary non-fiction, so obviously crafted to promote an air of fascinated horror, was beyond me even then. we lived just outside chicago—not a black-widow-dense area.

the most memorable case study was the deeply embittered texan woman. partially paralyzed by a black wisow’s bite, she now spent her days rolling about her spider-infested garden in a motorized wheelchair and spraying black widows with hairspray. why hairspray? such a manner of disposal ensured (as the woman informed us with relish via voice-over) that the black widows would die slowly, agonizingly, unable to move, just as she herself had been stricken unable to move after the bite. it seemed far too evident that the joy of this symmetry was now the shining light of her days.

at the end of the documentary, we poor innocent ones were urged to *always* *always* *always* check our shoes before putting them on, because black widows, though non-aggressive, love to bed down in the cozyness of empty shoes and would bite if there intruded upon.

stupid black widows. geh. i don’t want to have to compulsively check my shoes before putting them on, or else be haunted by the specter of myself as a crotchety old hairspray-wielding, wheelchair-bound crone.