The Spider

By Jeremy Arias

The birds hadn’t started singing yet and the moon had not yet been tucked away. The sun was still getting the last of it’s sleep, and I was trying to get the last of mine. I tossed and turned trying to fall into a trance, but it’s no use in this heat. My pillow was a sponge full of sweat that dripped from my forehead and I was almost able to smell myself.
Disgusted, I got up and went for my shower. It was almost that time of the month to clean up my sheets, so I figured it should come a little sooner if it caused me this much trouble. The laundry would be free soon enough if I did everyone’s laundry later, then they’d have no reason to need it.
The shower thoughts kept pouring into my head as I rinsed myself. I scrubbed my foot with the loofa and felt a tingling sensation on my ankle joint right on the part that feels like a ball is sort of sticking out of it. There were a bunch of bumps and red spots all around it. Something had a feeding frenzy on me.
The more I scrubbed it, the better it felt. As soon as I stopped, it began to itch and bother me. Was this the work of a mosquito? It couldn’t be, mosquitos leave behind a pyramid-like structure, this was the work of a spider. I investigated the spots and checked online as soon as I could of what spider bites looked like, and sure enough, it matched up. By now my foot was irritating me and I wanted to do something, but what could I do? How do you kill a spider you can’t find?
While I was online, I also checked what spiders hate. The internet is full of hate and you can find practically any kind of hate no matter who or what you hate, and apparently hating spiders is widely accepted. I found that spiders hate high pitched noises, smoke, and tree oils.
That’s perfect, I thought, I’ll just use these all until it leaves.
I cleaned my sheets later that day and sprayed the bed with tea tree oil. I replaced the sheets to the lovely sound of a high pitched screeching sound on an endless loop that I found online. It was pretty annoying and I could see why spiders hate it, and since I knew it would drive the spider out, I decided to sing along with it. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeee… It was annoying, but it was music to my ears.
Once I finished, I burned some palo santo and turned on the fan to spread it all around the room. The same concept works with just about any other insect too, not because of what you’re burning, but because insects don’t know the concept of incense. They assume the smoke is coming from something nearby burning and that they could burn with it if they don’t move out fast enough.
Once my room was an awkward smell of smoke and oil, I turned off the noise and kept going about my day. Once night rolled around I took twenty milligrams of melatonin and knocked myself out. In the morning, before everything else woke up, I woke up scratching my foot which now burned to the bone.
I grabbed my phone to shine a light on it, and what I saw I was not expecting. There were several other bite marks on my foot. The spider had not only not gone away, but he was pissed and took it personal.
Somewhere during the day he must have thought “Holy crap, he’s doing everything I hate and singing along to it! What the hell?” And at night while I slept he struck his revenge and took out all his anger on my foot. This meant war. But how do you declare war with a spider you can’t find?
I plotted. I was going to set this spider up. I paced back and forth all day thinking about how to get revenge on the spider. I thought about doubling the smoke and oil, perhaps playing the high-pitched sound louder and longer. I thought about everything spiders hated. I thought about how annoying the itch and burn in my foot was and what I could do. I wanted to bite the spider’s foot and leave him with a burning itch all day where he’d be spinning webs thinking about how he’s going to bite me and piss me off.
Finally, after hours of pacing, I got the idea. I shouldn’t fight this spider with hate. I should show this spider some love. Find the things that spiders like. Maybe I’ll sacrifice a fly and leave it near the bed so at night he would take the fly instead of my foot. I’d leave a fly with a few grains of sugar and a cap of water so he can see that I’m not worthy of biting. He’d see the fly, sugar, and water as a peace offering.
My next mission was to find a fly. I went outside to look for one and found them almost immediately. I killed one and decided to keep it in a sealed bag to preserve the freshness. If I was going to make an offering, this was going to have to be a good deal for everyone. I placed the fly beside the bed and threw a packet of sugar right next to it and a small bottle cap full of water. And then I waited…
The moon rose and I laid in bed waiting. Waiting. Waiting…
It’s hard to fall asleep with not only an itchy foot and sacrifice beside your foot, especially if you know that if you move too much you’ll spill the water on the fly and then the whole plan fails. I lit up a candle and kept it near so that I could see at least a tiny bit in case the spider came around or if the fly came back to life. Either one would be pleasing.
Hours went by and the only thing that had happened was that I sneezed. It wasn’t until around two in the morning that I saw something dark slowly float down from the ceiling. It was the spider fixing his web to drip down to the bed. It landed on the sheet and made its way for my foot, when it stopped and looked over at the sacrifice. It was a daddy long legs, I could see that once it got closer to the sacrifice where the candle lit up a bit more. It was confused and hadn’t known what to do. It grabbed the fly and hovered over the water for a tiny bit.
It scanned the fly and eventually spun it into a web and picked it up. I watched it climb back up the web and head back to the ceiling. He strutted to a corner of the wall where there was a bit more web gathered up and he left the fly there and began to relax.
That’s when I struck. I sprayed tea tree oil on a sock and stuffed it into another sock with a stick of palo santo and swung that sock straight to the corner where the spider resided. I screeched the high pitched sound as I swung some more and turned on the light. The spider’s body was nowhere to be found. I hoped it was dead, or I was in some deeper shit that I was before.