As Promised, Spiders

I don't know why we have so many spiders lately; the coming fall, perhaps, or maybe we're just a spider-friendly house. Most of them are the teeny little yellow-brown kind--good entertainment for the cats, not much trauma for the resident arachnophobe. I can deal with those.

But the other night, I walked into the bedroom and turned on the light and there, on the wall, was this HUGE black-brown spider. The leg-span on this baby must have been two inches across, and it had that figure-eight body peculiar to really BIG spiders--the one where the thorax is actually distinguishable from the rest of the body. He was big, is what I'm sayin' here.

I am not proud; I yelled for LJ. He hadn't been home for an hour, even, from his last out-of-state trip, and he was crabby at the interruption, especially for something as girly as my fear of spiders. I didn't care; this was--as I believe I have mentioned--a BIG damn spider.

He grabbed my house-slipper (deduct one point from the Excellent Boyfriend Scale right there!) and I looked away as I heard the "thwack". He calmly walked out of the room and came back with a wad of tissue, and informed me that he'd only smashed it, not killed it, and that it had run away under the dresser somewhere. As though that was fine; as though that wasn't an unthinkable, terrifying outcome. As though the spider would not now be lying in wait, spider-guts hanging from its horribly mangled body, plotting revenge. As though it were somehow OKAY that he had failed utterly in his mission to protect me from this vile creature. Fine, I said, whatever. "If you see it, kill it," he helpfully advised as he closed the door behind him. Gee, THANKS, mighty hunter.

Reluctantly, I went to sleep. And since I did not wake up choking, I assumed that the spider had perhaps gone to meet his multi-legged Maker instead of crawling down my throat. (Hey, they say it HASN'T happened. That just means it hasn't happened YET. That anyone KNOWS OF.) Anyway, I began to relax, and went off to work and forgot the whole thing.

Ah, complacency. Ah, trust.

Because at about 2 AM the next morning I woke up to go to the bathroom, and I blinked out one of my contact lenses and as I turned the light on in the bedroom to put it back in, I saw a blurry thing on the wall. I wasn't terribly worried; without my contacts, everything is "a blurry thing". Could have been a shadow, could have been a smudge, could have been a thundering herd of bison or the oboe section of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra--it all would have looked the same to me.

But when I got my contact lens back in I discovered: it was none of those things. It was...a GREAT BIG SPIDER, just as big as the one LJ had "smashed" the previous night. Oh my god, we've got a full-scale infestation, I thought, already making plans as to where the cats would stay while we fumigated the house...

I looked more closely. Something was not quite right about this spider. It looked...different. Off-kilter.

Seven-legged.

Apparently LJ's definition of "smashed" differs substantially from mine. The spider, except for that one leg, was perfectly whole and exactly as menacing as he'd been the night before when I'd asked LJ to eliminate it...and this time, LJ wasn't home. It was just me and the spider.

Snickers made a valiant effort, I'll grant him that. He leaped and leaped and launched himself at the wall a couple of dozen times, but the spider was about six feet up and Snick couldn't make it any higher than four feet or so off the floor. (He still gets points for trying.)

But that left me with a dilemma: either I could say "live and let live" and go back to sleep (yeah RIGHT)or I could come up with some way of taking care of the problem myself. Finally, after a few solid minutes of dithering, I settled on: the Swiffer.

A Swiffer, for those of you who've never experienced one, is like a small flat-bottomed mop. You take a dustcloth and adhere it to this flat rubberized block on a handle, and the dust clings to it when you sweep it over the floor. I told the spider "Wait here," and ran for the closet. I put a fresh dustrag over the Swiffer pad, so as not to have to clean up any more bug-guts than strictly necessary. I aimed the flat of the pad at the creature, drew back, and...

...missed. Entirely. The impact knocked the spider off the wall to the floor, where I actually FELT it thump body-first as it scuttled away. I let out a hoarse, guttural scream of total panic, bashed the Swiffer wildly against the floor in the general vicinity of the "thump", and--of course--totally missed the spider. Who ran behind the dresser.

I haven't seen it since. I'm living in fear of the repercussions...unless Snick has dispatched it in my absence, which--if he has--he hasn't told me.