Amy suddenly stopped talking. Her usual slow, mono-symballic sentences silenced. Her eyes locked onto the corner of the office. I turned my head, following her gaze. There, suspending in it’s fine web was the largest spider I think either of us had ever seen. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. I had a problem. If it was alive then I wasn’t so sure I was going to be brave enough to remove it myself. What would I then be teaching my client? These small (relatively) harmless (to humans..) creatures really were to be feared? I decided no action was probably the best action. Taking a deep breath, I locked eyes with Amy and we continued. “We’ll just keep an eye on it” I said.
Over the next few days and people I watched their eyes shift to the corner, bodies stiffen. “It’s dead”, I would say.
“Are you sure?”, “Really?”, would follow. I would repeat each time that it hadn’t moved once since it had been clocked on Wednesday. Relieved, but cautious, occasionally eyeing the corner, they would continue.
The wind blew through the trees as I staggered into the office with the vacuum cleaner, having run the gauntlet to get it from the house to the cabin. Running the beater bar over the purple rug, I remembered the need to remove the dead giant house spider from it’s corner.
The empty web blew gently in the breeze entering through the doors. I wondered quietly to myself, what size spider eats a giant house spider carcass?.
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