“You said you would protect me from a lion,” Mom said.

“Yes mom,” I replied.

“But you’re calling me to kill a spider?” she asked me slightly puzzled.

“It’s different.”

“How is it different?”

“It’s just different!”

“How?” my mom prodded.

“Well a spider has eight legs,” I explained with the slow shake of my head and mouth slightly open that assumed obviously.”

I ran back downstairs to my room to perform a location check… He was still there, perched on the wall, defying gravity.  He must have been as big as my eight-year old hand.  He was the writing on the wall, except he wasn’t announcing: “ME’NE ME’NE TE’KEL PAR’SIN.”  He was a light brown hand, an eight-legged furry hand with life and gunk inside of him.  He could be smushed, but then there would be a nasty, traumatic slime stain on my wall.  That would definitely be just too much for the animals. Froggy, my green sand-stuffed frog; Leo, the stuffed leopard; Benji, the longhaired dog, my sister’s pets who were vacationing with me.  Spider smoosh would definitely be too much for the nervous system, theirs and mine.

I was trapped between three forces – my mom’s declining faith in my boy abilities to protect her from a 500 pound (226.796 kilogram) 9 foot African male lion of the Serengeti, my emerging 8 year old NYC boymanchild ego, and a spider the size of the state of Texas.  I think he has a leather belt with a buckle name S on it for STUPDENDOUS.

And then it occurred to me: a benevolent, peaceful solution that would restore order in this quadrant of Queens.  I ran to the kitchen and found an old glass Goya guava jelly jar.   Perfect.  I returned to the room while quietly unscrewing the lid, I was in stealth mode.  I carefully aligned the jar so that the spider’s entrance would be enclosed by the jar.  I inched up to the wall, slowly, steadily.

I struck with the speed of Agalychnis Callidryas, but without brute force so that the glass would not shatter, and capped the bottle to the wall.  The spider was frozen, trapped between the wall and the glass. Then the thought struck me.  How do I cover the jar and then transport it outside?  Big Houston must have thought the same thing because the interior of the jar suddenly exploded with desperate kamikaze movement.  Hay-colored tumbleweed with unshaved legs scurried up and down and around the sides of the jar gaining strength with every revolution. I stood clenching the jar to the wall for 30 seconds, a minute, 90 seconds, two minutes, my man biceps were getting tired.  He wasn’t stopping, and I didn’t know how long I could hold on.  I screamed for Houston because we had a problem:   “Mommmmmmmmmmmmmm!”

 What was your childhood fear? Comment below..

“Talk About the Monster”, the children’s story and app, was released May 2021, Mental Health Wellness Awareness Month.  It is a whimsical little story for children to take a little BIG step to face anxiety and fear, before they have to face anxiety and fear because…”When you talk about the monster, you bring him down to size.”