My visitor doesn’t knock on the door in the bright sunshine of midday. I’ve never actually seen him or met him in any way in all the years of our strange acquaintance. Not even a letter or a telephone call. No Post-It on the door.
No, he — let me call him Jeffery, for I don’t know his name — Jeffery comes to me in that twilight zone time of half lucid moments between lying wide awake and being cocooned in deepest sleep, slumbering dead to the world, as they say.
It’s then, in this trancelike state, that I can hear him creaking open my old, squeaky front door, then drag his foot, scraping across the wooden floor above me, his plaintive voice calling suddenly, tiny as a bee’s buzz or a mosquito’s hum, for help, “Help me!” now he’s suddenly been caught in a hairy legged spider’s web, become a helpless little meal, poor Jeffery, soon to be savored, in a juicy acid broth of arachnid joy.
I’m afraid of spiders, but I fear my visitor as well, so I lie there listening to his minuscule scream and scream and scream, barely audible in its horrid cheeping heartbeat terror, I unable to fall into a peaceful sleep until there is that gradual muffling of his little squeal, the tiniest of voices being gobbled down for dinner.
Still he never dies, keeps coming around to look for me again. He stalks me. And every time, with no help from me, Jeffery is doomed to become that hairy creeping black spider’s gastronomic delight.
How odd it is that this ravenous spider with his shiny little fangs and pinpoint pricking eyes proves to be my savior, the perfect protection against my unwelcome guest.
Lanning Lee 