A Tale of Two Spiders

I came home from work and went to my desk. I have an old-fashioned computer desk in my bedroom, with drawers and a desktop computer and a monitor and everything on it. I sat down in my chair. On the corner of the desk to my right, I noticed movement. It was a little jumping spider. He jumped, or maybe hopped is the better descriptor, he hopped 1-2-3 times away from me. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a jumping spider, but they don’t look all gangly and gross. They look like a PR group tried to re-invent spiders to make them look cute or something.

So he hopped his little centimeter long hops, and then was on the side of the desk. I leaned my gargantuan, planetoid head around the corner and looked at him. He hopped around the corner to the back of the desk. I get that he wants privacy. I’m rooting for him. I hope the cats featured in the banner above don’t merk him. I certainly won’t.

About an hour later I met a different spider

I was outside smoking and I felt something on my forearm. I looked down, and a tiny little spider was crawling on me. By tiny I mean like the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Very small guy. I watched him negotiate my arm hair for a couple seconds. Must have seemed like the flora of an alien world. I considered just ignoring him. I’d never feel it if he bit me. But I thought about it some more, and I didn’t want him getting the lay of the land and crawling into my ear or nose and then into my brain. He’d end up controlling my body like a ratatouille. I’d be the immense slave-beast to a tiny arachnid, living out whatever his eight-legged will would be, with him so diminuitive as to elude detection by even the most sophisticated brain scanning devices. Can’t have that.

With my other arm, I activated my hand. Took my thumb and forefinger and made the most gentle little pincher I could manage. I hope I don’t kill you by grabbing you, I thought. I plucked him from arm hair forest and took him into the airspace above. Turning my fingertip pincher, I saw he was alive still. He was on the platform of my pointer-finger-fingerprint, and I decided to flick him away from me with the broad surface of my thumbnail. I tried.

He hung in the air a couple of inches away from my finger and did not fly away. The crazy sunnuvabitch had done it. He’d planted a little spidersilk anchor on my finger. He was being held on his little web string in the breeze, many times his own bodylength away from my finger. Clinging on.

How the fuck, I thought. That was less than a second.

I started to bring my hand toward my other hand, not sure how to outmaneuver this guy, really, but I had to try something. Then the rolling hot breeze picked up and I think it severed his spiderstrand from my finger. I’m like 70% sure he flew away in a slightly stronger breeze. I think I saw that.

And I wish my tiny, brave explorer well. I hope he crushes it out there in the apartmentscape where I live. He’s certainly not going to give up without a fight. Orders of magnitude separate our size, intelligence, presumable significance. But he webbed me and held on against my will.

And he is definitely not inside of my skull controlling my brain right now.

Unrelated, but if you have any flies or ants or anything just laying around please mail them to me. The fresher the better.