Along Came…Several Spiders.

"Spider poison is PEOPLE poison?!"

What are you afraid of?

Heights?

Snakes?

The ocean?

Dying alone?

Uni enrolment?

Everyone is afraid of something. I myself am afraid of many things. And one of those things is a very common fear, and nothing to be ashamed of. That is, the spider.

I am of the opinion that spiders have sinister thoughts, from birth.

How could something with so many eyes be trusted?

Admittedly, that photograph isn’t entirely factual. Everyone knows spiders don’t learn these things at birth, they actually learn them while they’re growing/harvesting/mutating in their mothers’ freakish silky egg-case.

My fear of spiders began at a young age, when I discovered that my parents had moved me from a country relatively safe from crazy spiders – the United States, to a country with the most ridiculous spiders of the most unimaginable horror – Australia. I learnt about each of these spiders at a museum, including what kind of bite they leave and whether they can kill you or not.
My 7-year-old brain couldn’t handle how scary this was, and I became almost inconsolable – I’d check every toilet seat before I sat down in case I got bitten by a Redback like the cartoon guy in the educational video at the museum. I’d cautiously turn over my shoes and pat them down until I was sure there wasn’t a huntsmen hiding inside. I’d pull all the sheets off my bed before sleeping in case any white-tailed, 8-legged monsters were waiting for me. I would scrupulously check the pool before swimming to ensure that there weren’t any funnel-webbed spiders in their unnatural watery cocoons at the bottom of the pool, anticipating my arrival.

In fact, it wasn’t until my brother sat me down after about the 5th or 6th month of my fear and talked me out of it that I was able to go on living like a normal 7-year-old (whatever that looks like).

However, I’ve never quite recovered, and although I don’t check every item of clothing and every pair of shoes and every toilet seat any longer, when I see a spider nowadays I bring my limbs in close together and feel the urge to vomit, and sometimes I cry or perhaps do the spider dance – the most attractive dance of them all (i.e. when you think there’s a spider on you so you start flailing about in circles uncontrollably). Don’t judge me! I’m a normal person, I swear. There’s just something about the way spiders look and move and bite and the fact that they generate webs from what, their butts?! That’s worth crying over. It’s upsetting, people.

He waited for a response until the day someone killed him with, oh, I don't know. A shoe.

Anyway, with all this important information in mind, I want to tell you about the terrible thing that happened to me last night.

I came home from church, walked through the front door. I quickly deduced no one was home so I went into my room, shut the door and didn’t come out for another 5 hours until DBo arrived from work. Are you jealous of my life yet?
DBo comes home. The time is roughly 11:15pm. I venture downstairs into the kitchen where she’s snarfing scotch finger biscuits and we begin talking about our days.

If you’ve never been to my house before, you wouldn’t know that we have a lot of photos all over the living room. They’re hanging from yellow strings which are intertwined all around the living room and they’re a good source of conversation when silences get awkward. DBo and I were glancing at the photographs and I commented that perhaps it was time to put up fresh ones. I looked up at the photos which are nearly touching the ceiling when I saw a disgusting and fearsome site.

"What...what are th- Oh MY G-"

Spider babies. Hundreds and hundreds of spider babies all over the ceiling. ALL over. And then not only the living room ceiling. I looked straight up and there were hundreds more directly above me on the kitchen ceiling. Just…sitting there. Growing. How long did they plan on sitting there like that? Until they all grew into full adult huntsmen, and there were hundreds and hundreds of palm-sized huntsmen hanging around on my ceiling?

DBo didn’t realise what I had seen until she saw my signature “I’ve just seen a spider” move. My wrists curled in and I pulled them towards my chest, and I bent over slightly. The fetal position is just so comforting at a time like that. The only difference between this move and my other “I’ve just seen a spider” move is that this time, it was so horrifying and panic-inducing that I couldn’t speak words. I just groaned and muttered until DBo looked up and saw for herself what was so deeply disturbing. This is how I looked to DBo when she looked back at me to see if I was alright:

This is what Not Alright looks like

Yes, I aged about 50 years just from seeing those baby spiders. Springing into action, DBo, who is deathly afraid of cockroaches but okay with spiders, gave me a jumper, plopped it over my head and told me to hide upstairs while she sprayed the absolutely crepe out of the ceiling. She grabbed spider spray, cockroach spray and wasp spray just for good measure, and sprayed the entire downstairs area while I crouched at the top of the stairs and watched.

The next morning we bug-bombed the house to make sure the mother huntsmen, wherever the bleep she was hiding, would die with her children. It sounds awful, I know, but remember what I said before: spiders harbour sinister thoughts.
Daddy-long-legs can hang out in my room all year and eat mosquitoes, that’s fine. But the minute spiders start invading my person space, i.e, giving birth all over the downstairs ceiling, a masscare will commence. By DBo, who has more balls than me.

As it were, when I came back after 2 hours, there were hundreds and hundreds of tiny spider baby corpses all over the floor. Disgusting. And there were also still a fair few who had died in their webs on the ceiling and were stuck up there. So I had to get a broom and sweep them all down, whilst occasionally stopping to dry retch and also sometimes spider-dancing, because their dead bodies were falling all around me. Then I had to sweep all the corpses off the couch and cushions and coffee tables and kitchen counters, and dry retch some more, and finally, vacuum up the several hundred fatalities.

Needless to say, it’s been an upsetting 16 hours or so for me.

And so, I’m gonna go take a nap…after I strip the sheets off my bed 7 or 8 times just to make sure there are no spiders.

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