The Legend of the Spider of Death (AKA "Can you find the iguana?")

Are you a sufferer of arachnophobia?

I am.

It sucks more than a vacuum cleaner.

And that’s a lot.

One night I was in my room, sitting in bed, and enjoying writing a story about someone or something or whatever. Pen in hand, tea by my side, paper in front of me… *ah* …the only thing that could have made it better is if the tea was soda and the pen was candy… and the paper a movie starring Eddie Izzard, Ed Helms and Will Smith. Let’s throw Keisha Castle-Hughes and Karen Gillan in there for balance.

(Of course I would still wanting to be writing said movie, and would need at least a $100,000,001.82 budget. I’m not picky.)

This film would be entitled: “Snow White Powder and the Seven Dealers” it would win all kinds of awards (including “Coolest Writer”) and make me famous.

Me getting famous:

While I was trying to get famous, I innocently glanced at the floor.

*Was that movement?*

I glanced again (this time not so innocently)…

*GASP!* IT WAS MOVEMENT!

It was a spider…

…of death.

But it wasn’t just ANY spider of death. This was, I shit you not, the biggest, baddest, baby-eatin’est son of an eight-legged, creepy, crawly, she-devil I have EVER seen in my entire life.

Then it began running towards me.

Now, let me take a moment to say that I know I suffer from arachnophobia. I know that what I actually saw was probably something like this:

But that knowledge doesn’t help me.

It doesn’t help me one bit.

What I SAW, What I remember seeing, what has been seared with a hot-iron into my memory FOREVER looked like this:

I was terrified.

I was Petrified.

Mortified.

Stupefied.

By a spider.

That was charging me.

I jumped up.

And I screamed.

Like a girl.

And it ran under my bed.

At the sound of my heart exploding, Behemoth, my brother—who was asleep in his bed across the room, woke up… ish.

He (kind of) opened his eyes and (sort of) looked to see why I was screaming like a banshee.

Of course, by this point, I was merely hyperventilating.

So he did this:

And then he went back to sleep.

I was (for all intents and purposes) alone in my room with a giant, man-eating demon sent straight from the bowels of HELL to torment me for my SINS!

There was a spider in there too.

Okay, I kid…

…the spider WAS the demon.

Somehow (I don’t remember exactly how) I escaped the bedroom with my life.

I was determined(ish) to defeat this atrocity of creation, and reclaim my right as the ONLY ONE who could hide under my bed.

But I needed to find something to aid me in my quest.

I went looking for a flashlight.

I couldn’t find the bloody flashlight.

Damn.

I stumbled on an electric lantern.

After I got up again, I took it into my room and tried to peer under the bed. This is difficult to do when you refuse to get closer than ten feet from the bed in question. (I wasn’t going to stick my face down there for it to feast on!) Luckily my bed is raised a bit high off the ground, and none of my blankets were hanging down. So I could see decently well as I looked for the beast below.

I didn’t find it.

The next day my mother brought a flashlight in from the truck.

FML

I still couldn’t find it.

Actually, I never found it.

To this day a demon-possessed spider dwells in my room… and I sleep on the couch.

Did you find the iguana?