It was a cold dark night like any other. I remember it like it was yesterday. Little did I know that day would be a real life nightmare that would devastate even the strongest of people; but somehow, I survived the most horrid experience that I am still am haunted by.
It was the spring of 2018. Bugs were starting to appear again and I was outside enjoying my day like any other. The weather was nice with a bright blue sky with little to no clouds. Kids and teens were all outside playing. I was outside with my new skateboard my mother was so kind to buy for me during Christmas.
We had little money ever since my father had left, but we still managed to get by. I had my mother’s blue eyes and my father’s curly blonde hair. I haven’t been able to get a haircut due to money, so my hair was shoulder length. Kids and teens in the street would often bully me for it, but I knew I was saving my mother money, so I felt proud.
After about twenty minutes of riding my skateboard trying to learn to Ollie a large sixteen years old stopped right in front of me. I was skinny, small, and only fifteen, so I stood no chance against him. “The board,” he said with his hand out. “Please, I don’t have many things. I already gave you two dollars this week,” I replied. He grabbed me and flung me to the concrete ground and rode off on the skateboard.
I got up and tried to catch up to him. As I edged closer he suddenly stopped. He let out a yell saying to get it off over and over. He flung what looked like a little black dot off his hand. He ran off yelling and I got my board back. I didn’t think much of the black dot, but I soon found out that it was much more than a black dot.
As I returned home to my mother, I asked her how her day was at work. She simply said how her co-workers were rude and stuff like almost everyday. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her come home happy. I told her I was gonna head to my room to read a book. She rubbed her hand through my hair and I headed off upstairs.
I felt strange, as if something was crawling all over me. I didn’t think much of it and carried on. It was ten at night and I headed off to bed. I still felt like something was crawling all over me. After about an hour it suddenly stopped, and I drifted off to sleep. I started to have dreams of spiders for some reason. I didn’t like spiders like most people, so I didn’t understand why I was having this dream.
I suddenly woke up, but I wasn’t in my room anymore. Instead I had a light shining over me and I was strapped to a hospital bed. “W- where am I?” I was so confused about what was happening. “Settle down son, it’s going to be perfectly fine,” a doctor said to me. “Doctor, will he be ok,” my mother said. Suddenly the curtains around it closed. I could hear what they were saying even though they shut the door on me.
“Mam, your son has a, how I say, spider problem,” the doctor said to my mom.
“A what…?” she replied.
“Your son… had a spider; black widow to be exact, crawl into his ear… There is no reason to wor-”
“Worry!? My son has a spi-”
“Not so loud. Don’t scare him, he’ll be okay. We just need to run a fluid in his ear. The spider has crawled up deeper, but the fluid will make it come out. There are no signs of serious damage. Not even a bite.” A nurse came and took my mother to the waiting room to calm her down.
The doctor came in. “Please roll over on your side. You will be here for a few days,” he said to me calmly. He put on a cartoon channel for me to watch and placed my head a certain way. “It is important that you do not move your head for six hours.” He poured in the liquid to my ear.
I was watching the TV just like any other person until I felt something strange in my head; not my ear. It felt as if something was crawling in it, then it stopped. It then stopped, and I saw it. The spider was on the bed crawling away, then died.
It was then night, and I still felt strange. I didn’t know how to put it, but my brain felt weird. Like, tingly, not the sort of tingly you get when you’re going through an ASMR moment or something. I mean walking, in my head. Five days went by and I finally returned home.
I was in my room reading a different book my mother had gotten me so I could get my mind off of the accident a little. I then felt something in my throat. I went to the sink because I thought I was gonna hurl, but something unexpected happened. Hundreds of spider were coming out of my mouth. Some on my face, others in the sink. There were so many spiders, I couldn’t even see the white color of the sink.
My mother wasn’t home and I had no idea where a phone was. I was freaking out as the eight-legged creatures were crawling and falling out of my mouth. I ran out outside and fell to the ground. Kids and teens were in shock and scared. Parents rushed their kids inside to shield their eyes from the horrific scene I had created in the front yard. Everything went black, and I could hear sirens in the distance.
I woke up in the same hospital bed as before and the doctor told me I had passed out for two weeks and went into a coma because of a nerve in my brain that was bitten. He said I’ll be fine and they managed to kill all the spiders. He sent me home that night.
It has been a long time since those horrific times, but all is better now in a way. I still have nightmares, and I am more scared of spiders more than ever. There is one thing I still don’t understand though. I still feel a tingling in my head…
