Excuse my hand. It’s a nervous tick at this point. I can’t help it. It’s just, there’s more. Always more. I just can’t let them finish their job now can I? I need to brush them away. …..just….brush them……away……
I should probably start from the beginning. It was my day off. My wife had taken the kids On vacation. We live with my in-laws and they were usually there. But my mother-in-law had gone with my wife to help with the kids, my father-in-law was at work and I was home alone with nothing to do. I clean the house, took the trash out and I had a friend coming over later that day. I decided to lay out in the hammock eating my late breakfast. I think it was like a pancake in a cup or something I don’t really remember. Anyway I’m laying out in the hammock, enjoying a rare moment of alone time, listening to some podcast. I’m not sure how much time had passed, it didn’t really feel like that much, but all the sudden I felt an itch on my nose. I went to go scratch it when my hand brushed against something. Initially I thought it was a hair but after brushing it……brushing it……. Just brush it away……… with my finger, I realize that it was a spiderweb. If I had only known in that moment what would happen, I would not have laughed it off as I did. See, what had happened was that the spider had gone from my facial hair in my upper lip and had started spinning a web meeting with the facial hair on my bottom lip. I thought it was strange, and at the time funny. I texted my wife about it, but it sent as a text message on my end letting me know that she didn’t have any service where she was. Bummer, she would have thought it was funny.
As I put my phone down, I caught something out the corner of my eye. A spiderweb had attached itself to my chin. Another one? I wonder if there’s a nest of baby spiders somewhere? I didn’t really care much for spiders but I respected them and decided that rather than going in looking for a nest I was just going to go inside and let them be. I should’ve hunted that nest down and burned it.
I went inside and received a text message from my friend saying that he was running late at a gas station that he was going to be here soon. I sat on the couch and decided to watch a little bit of TV, When I felt a small tickle on the back of my neck. A spider was waiting for me on the back of the couch and when I rested my head back, It had crawled onto my neck and was heading straight for my mouth. I brushed it off….. brushed…… brushed it off……screamed, and immediately squished it. Normally, I have a moment after killing a spider of thinking, “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that? Maybe That would’ve eaten all the bugs that I really don’t want in here?” Not this time. This time I squashed it and felt the most intense fear I had ever felt. I knew that something was wrong, and whatever it was, was coming after me.
You know that feeling after you see a bug and then all of a sudden you don’t see it? Your skin gets a little tickly and itchy? Yeah, that’s what I started feeling. That sensation. I haven’t felt anything else since. I still feel it. I ripped off my clothes thinking that they were under my shirt, under my pants, in my socks. My head started to itch. I started scratching and scratching and I couldn’t stop scratching. I couldn’t stop because IT wouldn’t stop. My hair was coming out in surprisingly large chunks and my scalp was bleeding and in a moment of panic, did the only thing that made sense: I shaved my head. Now you might think that’s crazy or an overreaction. But in that Moment of insanity, of physical and mental stimulation overload, I just sent that buzzer right through the center of my hair shaving it a direct line from the front to the back of my scalp. But it wasn’t hair. My hair was there yes, on the outside, enough to appear as my normal hair. But the actual real hair underneath, was gone. What was on top of my scalp, was a huge nest of webs and spiders that I had broken. It exploded as billions of spiders, from the smallest baby to the largest and hairiest crawling down my face, crawling into my mouth up my nose spinning webs sealing my eyes my ears my mouth my nose. I was suffocating, I couldn’t breathe. The next thing I knew I was awake lying on the floor. No spiders. But every inch of my house, the furniture, the windows, was covered in webs. I looked down thinking they had wrapped me as well, and for whatever reason, I was not. I sprinted to where I remembered the door being, tore through the webs, sprinted out, and never looked back.
That was three months ago. I hope my family is doing okay. I don’t even know if they saw the spiders or the webs. They must have. I hope they’re okay. To this day, I still find myself brushing webs off my face. Brushing…….brush it off……. Brush……it off.