Midnight Tarantella

It is nearly midnight of Sunday, 9-9-12, as I begin to type this.  I feel foolish even doing this, but there it is, what can I say?  I should be upstairs, in bed snoozing, out like a light, because I have to get up early for work. 

So, you might be asking yourself, why is she at her desk writing a blog post instead of falling asleep in her room?

Because there was a honking big spider in my room and I'm too weirded out to go back in there! 

How big, you ask?

All right, okay...maybe not that big, but even without my glasses on I could tell that it was the biggest spider I've ever seen in my house.  And it was on my bed.  ON MY BED!  where I was about to lie down and go to sleep.  Not only that, but it was posing in its menacing, eight-legged posture on my t-shirt I had planned to wear tonight, poised as tense as a rattler ready to strike if I so much as breathed in its direction.  After yelling "Omigod-omigod-omigod!" a couple of times (as if that was going to help) I grabbed the nearest thing I thought might dispatch the beastie with no harm to me.  I had brought up a plastic cup for water so I put that over my hand and smashed it against the spider.  Or so I thought.

I succeeded only in scaring the spider, which ran directly at the cup!  What was it thinking?  I had a weapon, and it was going to attack?  If I were a spider and something several hundred times bigger than I was was trying to hit me with something harder than my invertebrate body, I'd have run like hell for the nearest dark spot I could find - AWAY from my attacker.  Not this one!  It kept lunging toward me!

I smashed at it several more times with my red-cupped hand, all the while doing my kill-it-kill-it-kill-it dance from one foot to the other, missing the thing every time.  The cup cracked on the last attempt and two fingers slipped through the break.  I did a modified ninja leap over the bed and grabbed a flip-flop from under my dresser.  That's when I noticed one of the spider's legs had come off, stuck in the cracked plastic just above my fingers.

It was waving at me.

That's when I lost it.  The spider was no longer on top of my bed, but it wasn't on the floor, either.  I ripped the blanket and sheets from the bed looking for the thing.  Then a shadow in the space between the mattress and foundation moved toward the darkness.  Wielding the flip-flop as if it were a baseball bat, I beat the daylights out of every shadow I could find until one of them fell to the floor, limping away toward the dark under the bed.

SMACK! Smack, smack, smack!  Then one more for good measure.  The shadow pulled its remaining seven legs tight against its thorax and died.  Whereupon I ground its flesh deep into the fibers of the carpet, until only a wet spot marked its existence.

Exhausted, by emotions as much as the physical exertion the murder demanded, I tentatively checked to see if there were more of them waiting to cross my bed.  They travel in herds, you know, like deer, and if you see one, you can be certain there will be others waiting in the dark at the edge of the road (bed) to leap out in front of your car - or flip-flop - and frighten the life out of you.

I have to go put clean sheets on the bed and find another t-shirt to wear, one that isn't decorated with a dismembered spider parts.  I'm leaving the light on tonight, and sleeping with the flip-flop under my pillow.

Actual size of Spider:

No, I'm not kidding!