Kelly
Ferguson
Graham had always hated spiders, especially big hairy
ones like the one in the clear plastic box on his kitchen table. Not that the spider seemed to be
overwhelmingly fond of him, either. It
kept rearing up on its back legs, waving its uplifted feet menacingly at
him. The real problem, of course, was
that the creature has so many eyes.
Graham remembered reading about spiders’ eyes in grade school, and he
seemed to recall them having more than just two eyes. Or was it just that their eyes saw things in a different way,
like the prisms sold in the science store at the mall? Whatever it was, Graham knew that he and the
spider would never have the same perspective.
A cheerful yellow note was
attached to the outside of the box.
Graham read over the note, marveling at how the writer had taken bubbly
handwriting to a new level. The rounded
letters swept across the length of the small card, scrunching to fit at the
margin and then taking off again on the next line. “Congratulations!” the note beamed. “You have been selected for the Tarantula of the Month
Club.” Graham looked again at the
glowering spider in the box. This was
only the first installment, one of many tarantulas that would be entering his
life unless he got this whole mess worked out.
He had tried to explain it to
the delivery guy, one of those random couriers who don’t even bother to put on
a clean shirt. Graham preferred the
sharply starched uniforms of UPS
drivers,
even with those ridiculous shorts, or the vibrant orange and purple of Fed-Ex. But this spider had arrived via a
second-rate delivery service, held tentatively in the hands of a young man who
seemed more than happy to dump it on Graham and run. So now Graham was in possession of some rather large exotic
spider which had clearly been sent to him by mistake. He hadn’t even known there was a Tarantula of the Month
Club.
He looked at the note
again. It extolled the virtues of the
spider sitting on his kitchen table, which apparently had some long Latin name
Graham knew he would never be able to
pronounce. It was ideal for a
first time tarantula owner because it was so docile. Graham leaned over to inform the spider of that fact, but it
reared up again so he decided against it.
A smudged line of ink at the bottom of the note caught his eye. “Your membership has been given to you as a
gift.”
A gift. Graham could not remember the last time he’d
received any gift at all, with the exception of the crocheted sweaters he got
every year at Christmas from his mother.
His mind went over everyone he knew, trying to figure out who might have
sent him this misguided gift. It wasn’t
as if he had legions of friends dying to find the perfect gift for him.
Not many friends, no, but plenty
of people who hated him. Graham stroked
his thumb absently over the swollen handwriting on the card. How many people knew he hated spiders?
His
mother, of course, but she seemed to weave her revenge with fluffy pale blue
yarn. And then there was his brother,
but Graham was sure that a marine major would have more to do with his life
than search the Internet for ways to torture his own flesh and blood. That left only all of his co-workers.
He could see them in his mind,
standing shoulder to shoulder in an imaginary line-up. There was Betsy with her
fat, round mouth and cap of curly baby doll hair. She certainly spent enough time on-line to have discovered
something this diabolical. And Raymond,
his desk littered with framed photographs of the hot dogs his wife had
ruthlessly cut out of his diet. Graham was sure Raymond would never have
thought up something like this on his own, but he was resentful enough of any
single man that he might have gone along with it. Then there was Linda, always organizing and reorganizing the
pencils in the mug she kept on her desk.
What motive did she have? And
then he remembered the look on her face the day he announced that budget
constraints would mean more limits on the office supplies spending which, since
Linda’s arrival at the company, had been spiraling out of control. Could she have been upset enough
about
that to want revenge?
His thumb, tapping the edge of
the card, Graham found himself staring at the spider. Was he such a bad boss?
Was this a message? The spider
reared up again. It had no answers for him.