I’m 6, sitting on the concrete outside of our open garage doors.
And I let the cellar spiders crawl near me. On me.
Onto my hands, my arms, legs.
My parents in their togetherness, cooking on the grill outside. The air is easy to breathe and I can feel the setting sun on my skin.
I wonder, now, why I’m so fearful of spiders in my grown body.
It’s June, not the same June that it once was.
I’m 10, double digits now, a little less curious and a little more cautious.
The sun is beating on me, Im with my mom while she tends to chores, I’m playing with the water hose on the concrete outside of our barn.
She doesn’t know what happened to me 3 summers ago, I’d like to keep it that way.
The cold water feels nice, a relief from the burn of the sun and the burn of that summer.
I look down to the puddle below my feet and back up to my mom whilst she feeds the dogs.
Quickly, back down to my legs I look.
I have never seen a spider so large, so gone-unnoticed, and it was there, on me.
I don’t think. I scream, I kick, i feel my pulse in my chest.
A familiar feeling, nauseatingly familiar.
The spider seems to vanish into thin air.
Like it wasn’t there. Like it never happened, it wasn’t witnessed.
And my mom she laughs, but my hands are shaking, my heart is racing, I look down to see that I had kicked so hard I broke my flip flop.
I don’t know whether laugh or sob.
I wake up in my bedroom to the shouting of my parents, I’m 16. It’s 12:46 in the morning and my dad just came back from the bar. He’s drunk and I hear him slurring his words as they fight.
I move the sheets off of my warm body, to make my way to listen through the crack of my door.
Before I do my eyes pan to a corner of my ceiling, I see a shape. 8 legs and almost unnoticeable. Immediately I know what it is and panic sets in.
Spider, small really, barely bigger than a grain of rice.
And I’m scared of it, to where my eyes well up and my breath becomes shaken, my ears ring.
If I take my eyes off of it, the chances that it will disappear are too high.
I grab the closest thing near to me, a book, and before I go in for the kill, I hesitate.
What if it runs? What if it jumps toward me? What if I miss? What if I were minding my own business and someone took my own being from me? Squashed every amount of trust I ever had for anyone close me?
The book makes contact with the wall, spider in between.
I feel relief, I feel safer.
I peel my book from the wall, the ringing in my ears fades.
I no longer hear my parents yelling.
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