Ceiling Fans

The other night, I was in the lounge watching a TV show when Emergency Contact started yelling at me from the bedroom.

“Baby, there are…” pause and pause. More pause. I started to wonder if she’d forgotten what she was doing. Pause. The reason for the pause then became apparent.

She started again, “There are 21 spiders on the ceiling!”

My first thought was that she’d started some drinking song I didn’t know.

(To the tune of It’s Raining It’s Pouring)

Twenty one spiders on the ceiling

You know that’s not a good feeling

What we should do

Is kill one or two

Twenty one spiders on the ceiling

Twenty spiders on the ceiling

Only slightly better feeling

What we should do

Is splat just a few

Twenty spiders on the ceiling

Nineteen spiders on the ceiling

Make me nervous when I’m kneeling

What we should do

Is spray till they’re through

Nineteen spiders on the ceiling

… and so on.

But turns out she didn’t want to get into a long-distance-drive time-waster. We really did have 21 spiders on the ceiling.

A lot unlike Indiana Jones, I didn’t go barrelling down the hall, whip in one hand, fly-swat in the other, to face tarantulas looking like brown tennis balls with legs. Rather, I finished my very important show and sauntered in when it damn well pleased me. I figured if she’d had time to make a headcount, it couldn’t have been that bad.

I was right, but so was she. All over our ceiling, were baby huntsmen. They were large enough to recognise as huntsmen, but small enough for it not to be a scene from Arachnaphobia.

Twenty one was an estimate because there wasn’t a reliable way to get an exact count. They were randomly yet equidistantly spaced across the perfect white expanse of the ceiling and in constant motion. Not all of them at the same time, but always one or two. What was really cute, though, was that one would get the rabbits and take off in a crazy spider run, and every time he came within the zone of one of his mates, they’d take off in a ziggy zaggy to avoid being inside his  zone. It was one of the most perfect and furry-faced little examples of chaos theory in action in nature… then we killed them all.