It was after midnight when I finally heard my parents go to bed. But I waited another hour before I crept across my room, grabbed the bottle of nail polish remover that I had taken from my mom’s bathroom earlier, and inched into the corridor. I could hear my dad’s heavy breathing from behind the door at the end of the hall and decided it was safe to proceed. The floor just outside my room groaned under my weight, and I froze, certain someone would wake up and come to investigate. No one did.
I moved down the carpeted staircase and through the living room into the kitchen. Moonlight filtered through the window above the sink and lit up a newly constructed web inside the glass jar. It’s probably asleep. This is going to be easy. I grabbed a spare jar from under the sink, plucked up the one the black widow called home, and placed them gently on the kitchen counter.
I dumped half the bottle of nail polish remover into the empty jar. The fumes stung my nose and eyes, and I stood back and listened for noises from upstairs. Nothing. So far so good. I turned to the jar with the spider and whispered, “Your turn, you little murderer.” I twisted the lid but kept it pressed firmly in place. The spider hovered on its web, not moving despite being jostled.
I slowly slid the lid off and turned the jar upside down over the kill jar. I’m not entirely sure if the spider just happened to wake up when I tilted its home, or if it had been lying in wait for me to do something stupid… like remove the lid. I’m thinking it was probably lying in wait. Either way, one second it was perched on a strand of webbing, and the next it was on the edge of the jar, inches from my hand, about to escape. I didn’t react at first. I just stood there staring dumbly at the little beast—I imagined it staring back, eyeing me as if it were trying to decide where best to sink its fangs. I could almost see the venom dripping from its mouth. I held my breath, placed the kill jar on the counter, and reached my free hand for the lid so I could at least knock it back into its original jar. But when I moved, the spider moved too.
I panicked and fumbled the jar like some butterfingered quarterback. It would have crashed to the floor if I hadn’t found my grip at the last second. I snatched the lid from the counter and slapped it back into place. I realized two things when I leaned toward the glass jar to make sure I still had the spider trapped. First, I didn’t have the spider—the jar was empty—and second, something was tickling the tip of my ear. I jumped and swatted the side of my head like a flea-infested dog, sending the bottle cap-sized arachnid bouncing across the kitchen table.
A shiver raked up my spine, and I reached for the closest weapon I could find: a fork sitting beside the sink. The spider dodged left, and I lunged. The metal prongs found their mark, impaling the spider’s bulbous backside and pinning it to the counter. It twitched twice and then stopped.
Interesting fact: spiders don’t go limp when they die. They look pretty much exactly the same as they do when they’re alive. So I stood there for a few minutes, half expecting the widow to somehow dislodge the fork from the table and walk away. When I was sure it was dead, I picked up the spider with the fork, used the lip of the jar to pull the monster off, and then replaced the lid. I wiped up the mess I’d made, poured the nail polish remover back into the bottle, and cleaned up the kill jar, which I hadn’t needed after all. When I was finished, I returned the jar with the spider-corpse to the ledge behind the sink.
Hopefully, Becky wouldn’t see the fork holes. If she did, I thought I could convince her that they’d always been there. Who knows? Maybe some species of spider breathe through their backs like whales or dolphins.
When I was confident the kitchen was in pretty much the same state I had found it in, I snuck back to my room and crawled into bed. Even though it felt as though spiders were crawling all over me, I felt pretty good about myself. The whole kill-the-spider thing hadn’t gone entirely as planned, but I’d successfully saved my sister’s life. Not that she would ever know it. Just to be safe, I’d stick to her side like a fat kid on a cookie, at least until 2:23. But she definitely would not have a death by spider bite.
I closed my eyes and drifted off.
I woke up to a shriek rattling the rafters.