Late Night Stand-Off With a Spider

Well I had to kill it. There was no way I could go to bed and leave THIS THING intact and in robust health to wander freely and horridly about the house, crawling its inevitable way from the livingroom down the hallway to the bedroom, up the bedspread and to my neck. I already have two white spots on my neck where the venom from a previous spider bite wiped out my skin's pigmentation. 

But that spider had been a quarter of the size of this spider. Imagine what a bite from this sucker feels like. No, don't.

I had convinced myself  this was a wolf spider, when it first crawled out to greet me while I was working on the computer, and that was the more rosy-colored view. The alternative view that I could not entertain until long after his spindly legs had been obliterated, never to unfold again....was that he was a brown recluse.

Spider identification is nasty business. It requires looking at numerous images of spiders to see how "my" spider compares to the most objectionable ones. Which puts me in the crazy position of hoping it's a wolf spider. Instead of a brown recluse.

I'm forced to contemplate his horrible legs...imagine, wishing a spider's legs were hairier...and that repulsive little body....of course it takes on a violin-shape, once the suggestion has been planted.

But my post-mortem of the spider is a flawed affair beset by cringing and retching. Spider-identifiers of the world, what do you see?

Even though he was dead, one spider raises the unsettling promise of more to come. Where did he drag his wretched little body from? Was there a nest? The skin positively crawls.

Killing him hadn't been easy. He was heinously visible, but hard to get to. It's like he knew I needed a clear shot and a space wide enough to let me WHAPP! that shoe against his body. I finally had to move the computer table to get to him.

After I pulled out the computer table, is when I saw it, and my heart sank even further. Oh no. Crap, I thought. I really need to dust.