j4 | Eight-legged groove machine

The damn thing bit me. It was wandering around my bath, and rather than washing it down the plughole, I thought I'd pick it up and chuck it out of the window. So I scooped it up in my hands, and it was battering itself against my hands like a mad thing, and the whole tedious "my mum was bitten by a spider once and you know actually they all bite and they're all poisonous but most of them just don't have strong enough teeth to get through your leathery skin and their poison isn't strong enough to even make you woozy" thing went through my head, and then suddenly there was this weird tingling pain in my hand and the bastard thing had bitten me. So I squealed like a girlie and dropped it.

We got it out of the window in the end after a bit more fuss-arsing. It was the second spider we'd seen that night: there was a huge one in the kitchen earlier, and I tried to catch that, but only succeeded in chasing it under the fridge. Apparently that was about the size of the one that had crawled up

sion_a's trousers the other day.

Ten black spiders standing on a wall,
Ten black spiders standing on a wall,
And if one black spider should accidentally fall
It'd crawl up your trouserleg and paralyse your
NINE black spiders, standing on a wall...

Anyway, it re-emerged later, and that's when

sion_a's mum caught it, briskly and efficiently and in a pint glass.

- "That'd explain why we've had so little trouble with flies this summer," says

sion_a, in response to the upstairs bathroom spider incident rather than the downstairs fridge mother spider incident.
- "Well, I think one bite in 26 years is a small price to pay for being free of flies." I've already done the my-mother-was-bitten-by-a-spider anecdote, earlier, out loud as well as going through my head. It doesn't improve with the telling. "And besides, the flies probably bite as well."
- "House-flies don't bite!" He says. I've never seen a house fly.
- "Well ... but spiders eat mosquitos as well. And ... bugs. The ones that bite." I pause, before narrative honesty compels me to add: "Probably." I'm losing ground. "And I'd rather be bitten once in 26 years than be kept awake all night by a fly buzzing." Can't argue with that one.

It was strange, though, how I knew the bite was going to happen. I felt as though my hands were full of cobwebs. Maybe they spin when they're frightened? "His little heart beat so fast..." God only knows what kind of tangled web the spiders of love would weave.

But, as I was going to say, it is a small price to pay, and it reminded me of the bit in The Dark Half where the sparrow pecks Thad as a reminder that nobody ever really controls the harbingers of the living dead, after the bit where they've carried George Stark away, and I always imagine the cloud of sparrows around him like a cloud of flies. The torture never stops. Funny how some images stick, like napalm.