The Spider and the Windshield

This piece is dedicated to the especial abundance of spiders that have been plaguing my life this summer.

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           I had just got on the road after a long evening at work, and I turned the radio on as I headed down the familiar streets. Suddenly, a movement caught my eye. There, now I saw it. There was a spider on my windshield! And not a very friendly looking one either. Keeping one eye on the road, I leaned up closer to see if I could tell if it was on the inside or the outside of the window. If it was on the outside, I wouldn’t mind…but, it was on the inside. Zao gao! Now that I had seen this spider, I couldn’t get my attention off it. It scurried this way and that across the glass. I was still trying my best to pay attention to the road, but I was also glancing around my front seat to see if there were any Kleenexes or something I could kill the spider with if I came to a red light. But there were none, and I wasn’t about to kill that monster with my bare hands. So it continued on its merry way, round and round my view of the street. I began to cringe whenever it would step off the windshield and come creeping over closer to me. I didn’t particularly want to get to know this creature any better, especially since I was planning to kill it as soon as I reached home. I’ve always strongly believed that it’s best not to develop relationships that are inevitably going to fail.

If only the trip home wasn’t so long! I began to believe that this spider was making its loops around the windshield on purpose, simply to infuriate me. In fact, it probably had an even more nefarious plan in mind. This spider knew that he was distracting me from the road with his antics. In fact, it is likely that his whole intention was to distract me from traffic so that I would run a red light and get in a terrible crash. I would never have believed before that spiders were capable of murder plots with such a level of cleverness, but this one was. I named the spider “Nevermore,” after Poe’s ever-so-irritating raven. I said to him, “Just you wait, till we get home, mister.” There was my mistake. I had assumed that he couldn’t understand English, but I had once again underestimated the intellectual capabilities of a spider. He kept up his infuriating loop-de-loops around my field of vision until I pulled into my driveway and pulled out the key. Then, in an instant, he was out of sight. I sighed, knowing I would never be able to find him by a search of the car, and went into the house. The battle of Nevermore would have to be concluded on another day. And I would put a box of Kleenex in the car so that I could be prepared. That spider would always remember this as the day he almost conquered Rachel, but he would remember tomorrow even more clearly as the day that Rachel conquered him.