Harmless

Dear Xty'Alm,

I've just survived one of the most harrowing nights I've experienced in a long time. The fact that I'm writing this is a testimony that I survived well enough, but the psychological trauma is going to take awhile to get over.

Remember when I mentioned that spiders are the size of Mount Everest? Well last night I had the opportunity to meet one as big as planet earth itself.

Here's how it happened:

It all started innocently enough. I had just got home after a freezing moped ride through the dark streets of the town I live in and was getting ready for bed. My roomies had long ago gone to sleep and the house was dark and quiet. I rearranged the curtains in my room for maximum light blocking and tossed my pile of decorative pillows on the floor. Pulling back the sheets I sat near the head of my bed to plug in my phone.

Cue creepy horror/suspense music and slowly, painfully, crank it to its most horrifying, hair-raising and suspenseful volume.

As I leaned down towards the floor, plug in hand, I was sadly unaware that just inches from my head a HUGE, hairy, thick legged, glittery-eyed cane spider waited gleefully to scare the living crap out of me. It makes me shudder to think about.

These cane spiders are no normal spider. They're also called huntsman spiders, banana spiders and giant crab spiders.

They don't spin webs because they can't be bothered with silly trivial things like pulling silk out of their backend. They STALK their prey like a freaking panther in the jungle and they have big powerful jaws that can crack open cockroaches.  Their legs alone can extend five inches out from their hairy body.

And, worse yet, their eyes glow!!!!!!!! (I say in a hysterical voice). In reality, they just reflect light like a cat's eyes, but STILL.

SPIDERS SHOULD NOT HAVE GLOWY EYES.

This should be the law of the universe.

But as many people have told me, cane spiders are "harmless" meaning a bite won't send you to the ER with a bad case of rotting flesh or that condition commonly referred to as death. Yay... I guess. But can you really call this creature (which is as big as my hand) harmless?

I don't know what it's like on your planet, Xty'Alm, if you have creatures that bring on irrational fear, but here on earth, we humans are really good at being afraid of things that are, in and of themselves, harmless. But just because they don't bite or sting or kill doesn't mean they're not full of evil and death.

Here's a list of three ways "harmless" spiders can kill you:

1. Large, hairy, monster-sized Harmless Spider crawls onto the chest of Subject 1 while he's chopping up chicken for dinner. In an attempt to swat it away, Subject 1 stabs himself in the heart.

2. Harmless Spider, while giggling maniacally to itself as it leaves Subject 1 to die in a pool of blood, methodically makes it's way towards the bathroom, where Subject 2 is innocently taking a bath. You can imagine what happens next. Hysterical screaming. Thrashing about. Waves of bath water tsunami everywhere. Shower curtain falling down. Arms, legs, shower curtain and water all getting tangled up. Gurgling. Bubbles. Stillness.

3. Subject 3 is in the backyard, hunched over a power saw. Even without the din of the saw, the approach of Harmless Spider would be silent. You see, before graduating from Harmless Spider School, all arachnids are put through rigorous stealthiness training.

Perched on an overhanging tree branch, Harmless Spider stealthily deploys his internal rappelling line and slowly descends towards Subject 3's face. Five seconds later, it's a gory scene full of missing appendages and severed arteries and Harmless Spider skittering away laughing like a psychopath, looking for his next victim.

So you see, Harmless Spiders are very dangerous. They kill. They maim. They terrorize. It's all part of their grand scheme to take over the world.

Anyway, back to my story.

At this point, the suspenseful horror music has gone completely, eerily silent. I arranged my pillow, brush aside the curtain that sometimes flutters over my face and there it was. A foot from my face. Nearly in my bed with me.

Since it was late and roomie was innocently sleeping across the room, my normal full-throated scream reserved for large monsters came out as a high pitched gurgling EEEEEEEEP!!

Spider was as big as my hand, Xty'Alm, I'm not kidding. And in the time it took me to jump off my bed and run in circles trying to decide what to do, it had skittered down the wall, disappearing behind my pillow.

Despite my best efforts, my muffled scream had woken roomie, which was actually fine with me because there was no way I was going into this battle alone. She had just glimpsed the thing as it disappeared under my bed and uttered a sleepy slur of increasingly surprised and coherent words.

I handed her a flashlight and a mop. I armed myself with a broom. This monster was going down.

Thirty minutes later the room was a complete disaster. We had ripped my mattress off and turned the large piece of plywood that makes up my bed frame upside-down. Everything was moved to the opposite side of the room and we stood on little mountains of clothes and pillows, too afraid to put our feet on the floor.

The underneath of roomie's bed had been gutted and we painstakingly checked behind every bookcase, curtain, pillow and dust bunny, all while that horrifying suspenseful soundtrack kept playing in my head. I took a picture so I could show you the battlefield.

I just knew Spider was going to jump out at any second. It was going to run up my leg or down my head and I was going to DIE. My headstone would read, "And She was Killed by a Harmless Spider" and all the parents would point to my grave and tell their children to beware of harmless things because they might kill you.

No doubt the creepy cane spider was off in some dark corner giggling to itself as it watched roomie and I look in all the wrong places. Where could a gigantic spider go without us noticing?

It was 2 am and we knew we had to sleep. I drug my mattress out into the living room and roomie took up residence on the couch. I tried to think about rainbows and kittens and sunsets and cute things and I pulled my blankets over my head nearly suffocating myself.

And that's where the story ends. We never found the spider and the next night I had to go back to sleeping in my own room, trying not to imagine it crawling over my face while my eyes were closed.

The lack of resolution haunts me; I keep finding myself looking over my shoulder, jumping at any movement I catch from the corner of my eye. My subconscious is constantly making up different endings to the story.....

Spider went to greet the mailman by hiding out in the mailbox and died of starvation. 

Spider lost an epic battle against an organized and highly armed brigade of cockroaches.

Spider decided to learn how to swim during one of the afternoon downpours and drowned. 

Spider decided to go back to college and his brain exploded from all the studying.

I don't know if I'll ever get the resolution I want, Xty'Alm. I think I'm just going to have to live with this. Do you have any highly advanced gadgets on your planet that take away fears? If so, could you please send me one in the mail? Thanks.