The Night Of Friday The 13th

Should have seemed like a no-brainer: Friday the 13th. Something's got to happen. But it never crossed my mind.

Sure, it's Ukraine, and springtime. Birds chirping, shrubbery blooming, tulips and hyacinths and lilies all pushing up through the soft dirt like girls emerging from the walls for a Sadie Hawkins dance. Sure, it had been a nice, warm week.

A week that followed the most traumatic airport moment I've ever lived through. I was sick, puffy, red, and snot-filled as I gasped and choked my way out the door, onto the bus, into Kyiv and away from my lover, my husband. I snorted into cups in the medical office and started the antibiotics, making it home after a mere 12 hours on the dusty train with the accompanying smells and 3 incoherent hours spent bent up in a single seat on the mashrutka to my village. Then I spent the next day suffering the humiliation of one of my coteachers' near-utter desperation and lack of trust in my teaching ability, forced into observing her classes and the inadequate but inviolate Grammar Translation Method ("Otherwise, how will they learn? All you do is play with them, and that's nice, but you've got to teach them, too."); and then, finally, home. But a week through which I'd lived, and at last, I could stop moving.

I thought I would be able to collapse onto my bed and finally, finally, finally rest. Slip into the sweet oblivion of sheer, absolute, obsidian sleep.

But I didn't think that it was Friday the 13th.

So, I'm laying on my bed. I've wasted all afternoon and night (if you call going for a nice jog and cleaning up with a cozy little bucket bath a waste) just doing this and that. It's Friday, after all. I'm under the blankets, got the mac propped up on the pillow next to me, and I'm laying down and zoning out to - you guessed it and what else but - Moonlighting, when a spider crawls across the computer screen.

More like it was fleeing for its life.

In the faint blue light of the computery glow the spider's body looked twice as big and three times as fast, all the more grotesque as Cybill Shepherd had just opened her mouth to say something snarky to Addison. I gulped while a flash of calculations seared through my brain. Scream. Jump. Hide. I opted for "Slowly But Quickly Turn The Lights On, Trying Not To Touch Anything, And Simultaneously Locate A Wad Of Some Sort Of Material Appropriate For Fast Disposal Of THE THING".

I caught the spider just zipping into the crack of my computer towards my mattress as the lights came on. Luckily for me it made a break for it across my pillow. I lunged, triumphant. What made me look up onto the wall above me I couldn't say, other than perhaps the sheer magnetism of a particularly gory and disgusting sight.

A giant, segmented, flesh-and-black colored monster with hundreds of sentient slender appendages clinging to the wall over my bed, cursing the luck that had allowed its prey to escape on an invisible thread thus alerting me to its presence, burned into my eyes. A centipede. The word doesn't do the thing justice.


Understanding seeped into my brain: so why did the spider desperately descend? Oho, that's it, that poor little green porch climber had scrambled off the ceiling just a foot and a half away from my head because the wolf was poised, hunting for flesh, on the wall DIRECTLY ABOVE MY HEAD.

Am I overusing capital letters here? I don't think so. The situation was dire. In fact, I think I remained remarkably calm for the scope of the dire situation that faced me. Perhaps too calm. I felt the adrenaline flood my body, turning my limbs into icicles of resistance. Like my adversary the ginormous centibeast, when the lights came on and we locked eyes-to-hundreds-of-long-slender-legs, legs so large I could see the striped detail on the exoskeleton of each limb from fully five feet away, I froze.

While I could take swift action when it comes to the (comparatively, now) gentle little spiders I have been killing by the half dozen daily, it took me fully five minutes to actually think anything but, "Oh god, oh god, oh god, above my head, oh god, no, no, oh god WAS IT ON ME? What about last night? Was it here BEFORE?" I finally realized that I would have to dispatch the thing. Myself.

Now, before you start, I've done it before, don't get me wrong. But that was in Phil's house. In Dinkytown, Minnesota, where my husband and my brother and Anthony and Katie and my dog Sadie were all there to pet me and tell me how good I was for killing the creature. Where I could feel superior, since I was oldest, and know that I had an example to set. Back then, I'd killed so many of them I'd even researched the things, learning that while they were carnivorous, ravenous creatures of the moist, dark night, they rarely had a taste for human flesh and even rarer still could sting or poison.

But that's nothing to possible ravages of the Ukrainian Killer Centibeast. In my BEDROOM. Above MY HEAD.

Granted, it was 2:30 going on 3:00 at night when this episode in my life in Ukraine occurred. I'm not one to say that I wasn't entirely not delirious from mild fever, lack of sleep, and the kind of sheer soul-sucking exhaustion that comes from seeing your husband for the first time in 6 months for a total of 2 weeks and then saying goodbye for the next 9 months to come. I'm not one to deny that I was, perhaps, slightly more than agitated. After a serious internal debate about whether the thing would move if I left the room, I finally roused myself. I went to the kitchen, donned my bright yellow all-purpose touch-anything-gross rubber gloves, grabbed a wad of toilet paper, returned to find the vile thing in the same place. Terrified by the sudden change in environment. Confused maybe. Vulnerable. I climbed onto my bed, poised with my hand about 6 inches away, ready to go in for the kill.

And froze again.

What if I missed? What if it fell onto my bed and climbed down in there and I'd never find it because the beds weigh like 150 pounds and I can't move them and I'd have to sleep knowing it was down there, ready to crawl on me? What if I missed and it slithered onto my arm and up my sleeve? It was paralyzing.

Finally the agony of holding my arm up over my head like that overcame the agony of what might be and I sprang, smashing the thing to a million quivering, twitching little bits. So much for the villain of the night.

I haven't even mentioned how, back when I flicked the light switch on, three more spiders went scuttling for different corners of the ceiling and another, smaller centipede clung to the wall above my curtained windowsill. I spent at least an hour stalking all the insects I could find. In the disoriented slumbery wakefulness of being startled by that first spider, to find my apartment seething with insectival wildlife was gut-wrenchingly horrifying. Back in my other life, in my household, I'm the stalker of bugs, the smasher of spiders. But this was just too much.

After close scrutiny of every corner, nook, and crevice, I finally collapsed. I curled up by my computer with my new stuffed monkey and called Dan for some much needed "Don't worry, honey, it's the only one there. You killed it. It's not going to come back. Even if it did it wouldn't want to hurt you. It's more scared of you than you're scared of it." I taped the holes on the wall with masking tape (convinced like a paranoid that it had slunk out of one of them, I kept replaying the image of it emerging stealthy and hungry in my mind's eye, all those legs slithering out of the tiny cracks) and took his advice, retreating into my sleeping bag (after thoroughly shaking it out) and pulling the hood tight around my face. I was trembling, couldn't stop shaking, I had a tinny taste in my mouth, and I startled awake several more times that night - or should I say morning? By this time it was 4:30 at least.

What a night. Who says that Friday the 13th has to be evil? Just one mother of a centipede, its smaller cousin, and a minor stampede of green garden spiders determined to turn my room into an entomological exhibit, that's who.