Short Stories

Spitter

Chrissy’s ears itch and crackle like the sound of a brown bag slowly ripping, a continuous grumbling deep in her ear. She realizes it’s a primal response that triggers crossed wires in her brain to transpose into sound, the sight of a large spider crawling across her pillow. She feels the familiar twitching of her forehead as invisible fingers seemingly comb through fine blonde hairs at the base of her neck. Bad enough that the creature has entered her inner sanctuary of respite and privacy. Now, alone, on Halloween eve, she has to deal with this. This.

As a child, she endured the macabre torments of an older brother’s teasing–as boys will do–when he would catch a brown daddy-longlegs (clutched loosely in his cupped hands) and drop it onto her bedspread–she was never allowed in his room. After several taunting minutes of corralling the specimen with his palms and forearms, he would commence to pluck off its legs one-by-one with a tweezers until it struggled helplessly on its last appendage, followed by an awkward dance of death. Chrissy used to stare in fascinated horror, unaware that the bug looking back at her through its array of eyes would never spin a silk web to graze her cheek or catch in her hair, and that the real danger to its tiny prey was a deadly venom that wasn’t toxic to humans since its fangs were too short to puncture her skin. Still, she knew that it might, on its one remaining leg, limp into a hidey-hole she couldn’t see into, where she was too frightened to search for it with her little-girl fingers.

And then, when all the family was asleep, and their collie had stopped its nocturnal pacing–nails chinking down the uncarpeted hallway–and the moon went dark behind cottony-gray clouds, she knew–knew–that the one-legged pholcidae would emerge to hunt. To find her. To eat her, one tiny bite at a time. Goosebumps rose on her arms. Too scared to lie on her pillow or to sit on the floor waiting for the single-legged monster to drop onto her head, she tiptoed across the room to her sister’s twin bed and swapped out the striped pillow from beneath this sleeping sibling with her own. And then the older girl would launch into a volley of tearful shrieks and accusations. Soon the light switch would flip on, and a pillow fight would begin in earnest, strewing feathers and–Chrissy knew–spider eggs all over their bedroom.

This creature, now crouching before her, has evolved. Its jaws are larger, and the golden eyes trained on her seem to be saying, it’s payback time. Remember all the spiders your brother tortured? You stood by–a wax doll with glass eyes–never intervening, never defending us. And for all the ants your brother stomped on for sport, all the flypaper you hung, all the DDT you sprayed.

The white spider watches Chrissy as it lies quivering, huffing on her bed linen, its head mimicking her every move: she turns to her left and the creature’s red eyes rotate laterally. She raises her hand up to shoulder level and the critter’s front spindly leg jerks upward. When cornered it emits a strange odor like a stink bug, like cilantro gone bad. Suddenly it spits at her–a milky venomous gel. A drop of its goo lands on her hand, burning like acid, leaving a red mark on the skin the size of a cigarette burn. Leaning down, Chrissy reaches out to snatch up her iPad from the night stand intending to deliver a crushing blow. Seizing the opportunity, the spitter springs up in a wide arc, landing on the crown of her head. She screams, frantically raking at her scalp to tear the terrible thing out of her hair. Chrissy feels its toothpick-thick legs graze her fingers as it runs down her palm–emitting a high-pitched squeal–landing on the philtrum above her lip. In an instant the heinous thing rushes up that small patch of skin into her nose. She dares not swat at her nostril, risking release of the 1,000 eggs on its back. Choking, she feels it crawl down her throat. She coughs and screams again trying to expectorate it, but the devilish thing clings tightly to her dangling uvula. Gagging, she shoves wads of peppermint-soaked cotton balls in her mouth hoping to dislodge it. What had the exterminator said? Peppermint oil will keep spiders from entering your house. They don’t like it’s pungent scent. Do spiders have noses?

In a moment, the spider reverses course and claws its way up into her nasopharynx. She snorts more peppermint oil straight from the glass vial. But the attacker keeps moving.

She feels Spitter, feels the burning inside her head as its venom dissolves bone and the bug plunges into her gelatinous brain. Now through the skull barrier, Spitter begins to feed on her cranial nerves.

Chrissy imagines its eggs hatching in her brain when one-by-one her senses falter as the hungry hoard sets to work. First the peppermint aroma disappears–goodbye Cranial Nerve I. Or do I have Covid, she wonders? Her vision clouds as the larvae eat through Cranial Nerve II. Her eye movements are jerky as the spitter army severs III and IV nerves with their microscopic jaws. Her face feels numb and eye movements cease all movement as V, VI, and VII are destroyed. Soon she can no longer hear and her balance is off, VIII is shredded. Chrissy tries to swallow but IX is gone. Her heart pumps erratically, and her gut churns, Cranial Nerve X. All neck movement ceases, and her tongue lies dead flat in her mouth, nerves XI and XII. A gaping hold now lies in the base of her brain and a thin trickle of blood seeps out of her nose. Darkness.

Days later, Chrissy’s grieving brother opens a sympathy card with no return address. Inside he finds no signature. Instead, there lies but a single spiny spider leg.