June 28, 2002 (idea)

See, I just moved in not too long ago, and as I'm sharing the house with a friend of mine who already lived here, all my stuff is in boxes in my room. This means my room consists of, basically, a maze of boxes, some shelves (which also contain boxes) and a mattress.

The first wave of attackers came via a Trojan Horse. I awoke one morning to the sound of a gentle scritch-scritch noise. It took me a while to convince myself that I wasn't just imagining the noise, and it took me a while longer to locate the source. As far as I could tell, the noise was coming from one of the boxes. I studied the box intently from every angle, and deduced that the noise was located somewhere inside one of the top cardboard flaps. I said "huh," and went and got breakfast. When next I entered the room, I was confronted by a newly-hatched family of what appeared to be yellow jackets. Grabbing a shoe, I smushed them quickly.

That was the first wave.

Wave two came the next morning, preceded by that same ominous scritch-scritch noise. This time I couldn't for the life of me locate the source, but I sat there, vigilantly awaiting the emergence of my enemy. Finally, they emerged. And I smushed them, like I had their brothers from the other box. But mother nature was not finished with me.

Wave three came in the form of several large black ants. They weren't quite large enough to be carpenter ants, but they weren't quite small enough to be regular ants. I noticed them crawling around on the wall near my bed. Not one to be easily fooled, I diligently searched for the other five million ants, but could not find them. This amazed me, since I had never ever seen just a few ants. Ants always come in millions, don't they? In any case, I considered throwing away the food trash on the floor at the head of my mattress, but decided I was far too lazy to do so, and figured that when the three ants sounded the alarm, they would reveal the rest of the colony and I could eliminate them.

It appears the ants were too smart for me. They have ignored the food trash completely, even though I've tried on multiple occasions to tempt them with delicious candy, soda, and even goldfish. I never saw more than three ants at one time, either. The little bastards were crafty. Occasionally, one or two ants would join me in the bathroom for my morning shower. I thought that perhaps by killing some of them I might set an example and scare the others away. My room and bathroom are now littered with the crunched bodies of dead ants, but the others are not fazed. Every morning, there are two or three ants waiting to greet me, even still.

Wave four, like wave three, is still ongoing. Whereas the previous waves consisted entirely of insects, wave four is all spiders. The first incident occurred early one morning, when I awoke to something tickling my legs. I ignored it for a while, thinking it was just the comforter, but it didn't stop. I whipped the covers off to discover, much to my horror, that a large brown hairy spider of some sort was building a web between my legs. This little bastard was blatantly ignoring the fact that I was a living, moving being, and had gotten halfway through the construction of his new home before I woke up. I decided, unwisely, to spare his life, and merely swept him off the bed.

Later that morning, after having said hello to the ants in my shower, I encountered Mr. Spider again. He had attached himself to my shirt, and I was alerted to this by the fact that when I put the shirt on, he detached himself from the shirt and attached himself to my face. There was no kindness this time. I knocked him to the floor and smushed him without mercy.

There was a quiet period of a few days following this incident during which I thought my troubles had finally subsided. The ants weren't bothering me, and they didn't seem to mind me killing them occasionally, so things were going alright. But then, one night, I lay down in bed and reached for my book and suddenly noticed a very disturbing portent of doom: a mere eight inches from the head of my mattress, right there on the floor next to me, was the curled-up, dead body of a gigantic monster of a spider. This guy was huge. And dead. His deadness disturbed me. Spiders don't just die. Something had to be horribly wrong.

My fears were confirmed the next evening, when I lay down, grabbed my book, and noticed that the dead spider was gone. Well, mostly gone. Two of his legs remained. And a single ant was chewing on one of them. I searched frantically for the other ants, but to no avail. For all I could tell, the colony just swept in while I was away, devoured the spider, and swept back out, leaving behind a single straggler to confuse me. I know the one ant couldn't have eaten the whole thing. Right?

I went to sleep and woke up the next morning to find that even the legs were gone now. There was no remnant of the dead spider. And still, there was a single ant, poking around the carpet where the spider had been. Eerie.

That night, as I tried to fall asleep, I kept getting the distinct sensation that little tiny things were crawling on me. On my head, on my face, my arms, my legs...I knew I had to be imagining it, but it just wouldn't go away. Finally, I turned on the light and discovered -- to my horror -- that I wasn't imagining it. I was covered in tiny little translucent baby spiders. Then I remembered something I had learned as a kid when I read Charlotte's Web: many spiders die shortly after bearing young.

Shit.