Shelob’s Stuntdouble

So for you naysayers who think I’m all talk and no action, I’m going to be posting up a section of It’s Always a Sunny Day to prove that I don’t just sit around and talk about writing. It’s only a section, rather than a full chapter because it works, more or less, as a complete story.

Warning: To my fellow arachnophobes, the following story may be incredibly disturbing. In fact I got goosebumps just writing it, and I may have crawled into the fetal position under my desk during certain segments…

It was another beautiful day on Long Island, in fact I was almost getting used to seeing the giant glowing ball in the sky everyday. Bobby was going to be spending most of the day at physical therapy, and so Amanda and I continued our mission of cleaning the house. Today we were going to clean the windows. I started out in the back of the house, cleaning the sliding doors, so I could enjoy the sun. After spending a blissful half-hour scrubbing the windows out back, I went to the front of the house.

The front of the kitchen area boasted three plate glass windows, the center of which was set slightly behind the windows to its left and right. It was that center window that is burned into my memory, and still haunts my nightmares.

Like a doorway straight into the bowels of hell, the glass plate window loomed in front of me, and every inch of it was covered in god damn spiders. And not just one or two tiny little web-spinning annoyances, no, there were literally dozens of the foul nightmare fuel skittering all over the window. Huge yellow webs had been spun in the corners of the windows where dozens of unfortunate insects were now stuck, waiting to be devoured.

So there I was, a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels my only weapons against an army of spiders waiting for some idiot like me to piss them off and causing them to start a rampage of eight-legged terror and death the likes of which had never been seen before. I was preparing to sacrifice the lives of the Amanda and Bobby to the spider horde to save myself, when I saw my salvation…a garden hose with one of those hosehead attachments that let you change the spray settings.

I switched the setting to a high pressure, narrow stream of water, and began blasting the swarm of horror. Spiders went scattering like leaves in the wind, some were blasted apart as the water hit them, others were sent slamming to the ground in a waterfall of spidery doom. The rest retreated into the sills at the left and right of the window.

“There’s no escaping me! I AM POISEDON, GOD OF THE SEA, BOW BEFORE ME YOU…foul…creatures?” My prideful boast was reduced to panicked whimpering as the mother of all Spiders came creeping out from beneath the upper sill of the window. All I could do was stare in horror as the massive behemoth came out from its hiding place, unfurled its eight inch-long legs, and began creeping its way into my soul. Our eyes met…or rather my eyes met its eight multi-faceted horror inducing mega-eyes. Its two huge mandibles were twitching hungrily, and the right leg nearest its head seemed to beckon me like a skeletal finger, and I swear, the hairs on that leg looked like they were giving me the finger. So far, only its massive head was peaking out from beneath the sill, but already I had seen enough. But like an overzealous stripper, only you know…horrifying instead of awesome, she wanted me to see it all…

Out it came, a huge bloated looking spider ass, boasting several colorful striations that would have looked pretty on anything except the corpulent body of fangs, venom and terror now crawling down the window. The window seemed to shake with the weight of her as she calmly and deliberately strode across the window, planting herself right in the middle of it.

Go ahead, she seemed to say, make my day.

So I did: I blasted it with the hose, squeezing the trigger on the hose-head so tight that my knuckles went white. I blasted the spider for a full minute, but the spider held its ground, not the least bit bothered by my watery attack and actually seemed to be enjoying it. When I finally relented, the mother spider simply shook her legs a bit as if drying herself off, and then began making her way to the side of the window to check on the rest of her brood.

That was it, I’d given it my best shot and I’d failed…it was time to tell Amanda that shit had just gotten real.

“Amanda?” I asked, poking my head into the kitchen, “Can you come here?”

Maybe she can call an exterminator…or the army…yeah the army sounds good. A flamethrower is just what this things needs. I thought as I waited for Amanda.

“What is it?” Amanda asked as she stepped outside.

“Look at this huge spider!” I said, pointing to the eldritch horror on her window.

“Where?”

Where!? WHERE!? I almost screamed. How could she not see the abomination now twitching only inches from her face? Perhaps she simply can’t comprehend the horror that’s in front of her, maybe she’s going into shock!

“Oh, that.” Amanda said, sounding completely bored. She quickly grabbed a paper-towel from me…and then smashed the mother-spider with it.

“Yeah, that was a nasty one.” She said, crumpling up the towel and tossing it in the garbage.

She had just smashed the largest god damn spider I’d ever seen like she was wiping a stain off the window, it didn’t even register on her radar. To this day, thinking about that spider sends chills down my spine, but not Amanda.

To hell with Samwise. If Frodo had brought Amanda with him when he went to Mt. Doom, Shelob would’ve been a ball of giant industrial-sized ball of tissue-paper in seconds.

Bobby got back from his physical therapy later that afternoon, and I told him about the spider. Oh did I tell him. I spun a tale of woe and horror that I thought for sure would make even the wizened old CIA spook shiver. All he had to say was:

“Wait wait wait, you need a woman twice your age and half your size to kill a spider?” He said. Cocking his eyebrow, Bobby simply stared at me, his face frozen in a mask of unbelieving skepticism. Then the corners of his mouth began to creep upward, and the crows feet around his eyes became deeper and more pronounced. Bobby burst into a deep, bellowing, belly shaking laugh.

He’s laughing at me! I realized with blush.

Bobby laughed for a full five minutes, and when my parents arrived later that night, he gleefully retold them the story, complete with the embellishments that accompanied Bobby’s stories. The giant spider that could have been the stunt double for Shelob was now a tiny little ant-sized bug, and I was now a weeping, shaking, little coward (okay, maybe that part wasn’t an exaggeration.) I tried to get Amanda to back me up.

“Amanda! Tell them how big that spider was!” I pleaded. Amanda wordlessly touched her thumb to her forefinger, forming a circle as big as a silver dollar.

“No, no, no, no! It was WAY bigger than that!” I argued. Bobby, Amanda and my parents just kept laughing.

Well it was bigger than that. That spider was big enough to eat a small child, and I don’t care what anyone else says, so shut up!