Giant Killer Spiders

I seem to remember my parent’s house having a roof over it. And also a lot less giant killer spiders hanging out around it. Maybe that was just me though. I wasn’t always the most observant kid in the world. Especially before the world went topsy turvy and started spitting out stuff like giant killer spiders. I won’t bore you with the details. Mostly because I can’t really remember most of them myself. Nuclear holocaust this, crippling cyberattack that. You know the drill. Long story short, all electronics have been rendered useless, hyper intelligent mutant insects now roam the globe, and I had spent the last six months traveling across the country to get where I was standing: Muncie, Indiana. My old stomping grounds. Weirdly enough, the whole town looked just like I had left it. Give or take about twenty to twenty five bug monsters.

I realize the tone I’m striking probably isn’t the tone you pre-apocalypse newbs might be expecting of someone who witnessed an era defining event, but I promise it’s perfectly natural. Lots of people respond to trauma with humor, and even more respond to their trauma with the insatiable urge to travel across the country and visit their dead parents country style home. As I walked through the wreckage of said home, I thought back on the time I spent in Muncie and I took extra care not to upset any of the spiders that seemed to have taken up residence in the chimney. Not much of the house was left. I could only assume I had whatever few scavengers that still lived around these parts to thank for that. If I’m being honest though, that just made the parts that survived that much more special.

I passed the living room `I learned how to do handstands in, the bedroom I had my first kiss in, and the bathroom door full of notches that I used to use to measure my height. I saw the drapes that my mother had spent weeks picking out and the bedsheets that my father had bought in less than five minutes at a fire sale. Then I found it. My mother’s locket. Heart shaped and carved out of bronze. She never took it off. Inside I found what I had come all this way for: A faded photograph of a young man and woman, my parents, in cutesy vintage threads, grinning from ear to ear inside of a photo booth. The last physical photo I had of them.

As I held that hunk of metal, it really did feel like I was holding a live beating heart in my hands. That’s when the water works started. I cried harder that day than I had in a really long time. Call it the heat of the moment or call it grief delayed, either way I was curled up in a ball, crying into my parents rug trying to pretend I didn’t notice the slowly encroaching arachnids all around me. Surprisingly, I didn’t really mind. It was nice just having someone to be close to. Even if that someone didn’t really care about how I felt and probably was just there to chew my face off. Eventually I was all cried out. I got up, strangled two or three contentious spiders with Dad's bedsheets, and left Muncie a changed man. A stronger man. One who knew he would never again have to live his life in fear of forgetting his parents faces.