the forces of evil will not be tolerated

Last night was a big deal. Last night I finally killed the spider under my heater. I've been stalking it, keeping notes on its vile habits, waiting patiently for one year. It's been safe in its carpet-surrounded cave (built around some sort of old vent that comes out of the carpet right beneath the wall heater). It was quick, savvy and geared toward survival, but I knew that someday (somehow) it would make a mistake.

So, to back up, I've been hanging out at this bar a lot recently because it's about a thousand times warmer than my apartment and F.C. lets me sit there for hours and drink peppermint tea and I run into people I'm getting to know and it's generally just a nice place to be. I went there after work yesterday and stayed until about 9 p.m. When I got home, I got down on my knees and scooched underneath my kitchen table to get to the heater dial. Out of habit, I glanced down to the spider's cave. I froze. There was the spider, almost completely exposed, though still under the heater, five inches from its cave, sucking the life juices out of a bug.

I watched it intently for a few minutes and then worried that it could sense my intensity and scurry back to safety, I pushed myself out from under the table, my hands shaking with anticipation. I was going to kill it, kill it dead and dance on its remains.

This spider is frighteningly creepy: matte black, with a huge evil body and legs like scissors. It's the most efficient-looking spider I've ever seen. I have no idea if it could kill me or not.

My first plan was to throw a damp blob of toilet paper at it, trapping it in suffocating wet folds to cut off escape and then smashing the life out of it with a shoe. This only somewhat worked. It cut off the spider's escape, yes, but it didn't do much else. The spider scurried out from under the toilet paper before suffocation happened. So I grabbed a bottle of Windex and cowed it into a corner. Then I waited. It huddled for a while, pretending to be dead (I wasn't fooled. I'd seen this before). Then suddenly, it sprang. It ran across the useless toilet paper and -- I couldn't believe it -- straight out from underneath the heater, out into the vast carpeted wilderness of my room.

Maybe the Windex affected its brain and gross motor skill. Maybe it couldn't see or sense anything, blinded by fear or anger.

Either way, it's now a pulpy blob on my carpet floor. The shoe always wins. Always.