Arachnophobia

That title, while relevant, is somewhat less than accurate, because I'm not particularly afraid of spiders (though I'm certainly not fond of them, either.)

So, this morning, I found what I'm pretty sure was a brown recluse spider in my kitchen sink.  I know that the brown recluse has the distinctive violin marking on its back, but I didn't have my glasses or contact lenses, having just awoken a few minutes earlier, and I certainly wasn't going to get close enough to it to examine and identify any pattern that might or might not have appeared on its back.

It looked up at me, calmly and expectantly.  It seemed to be waiting for me to offer it a cup of coffee, or maybe some orange juice and toast.  As I said, I'm not particularly afraid of spiders, and perhaps this one, accustomed to human encounters accompanied by shrieks of terror, mistakenly thought that my silence indicated welcome.

The thing was already in the sink, not far from the drain.  Problem solved, I thought.  Instead of the hoped-for coffee and Continental breakfast, the spider got the business end of the faucet hose.  Then, after a few minutes of the deluge, I turned on the garbage disposal, just for good measure.  I thought for a moment that I'd probably be remembered among the brown recluse community as a monster, a fiend so cruel and wanton that mere drowning of an innocent spider wasn't enough to satisfy me; I had to torture the poor dying thing, too.

Imagine my surprise, then, when 20 minutes or so later, I found a spider in my sink again.  Notice that I didn't say "another spider" because I'm not sure, in fact, if it WAS another spider, or the same one, tougher and more resilient than I could ever have imagined.  What doesn't kill a spider might make it stronger, I thought, so this time, I squashed it.  THEN I ran the water and turned on the disposal again.  I tried not to think too hard about either of two distinct possibilities:

1.  A new breed of bulletproof, kill-resistant, super spider that can withstand all extermination attempts
2. Spider infestation

No sightings since.  Maybe word of this morning's incident has spread, and the spider community is wisely avoiding my house of death.  Or maybe they're plotting revenge.  I'll find out soon enough

PS--I thought to accompany this post with a photo of a brown recluse, maybe with a funny caption ("Actually, do you have soy milk?  I'm lactose intolerant.") but if you've never done a Google image search for brown recluse spiders, then do yourself a favor and don't.  It's not the spiders, because if you've seen one, you've seen them all.  Necrotizing spider bites, however, are all different and each is more gut-wrenchingly disgusting than the last.  You can't unsee some things.  Don't say you weren't warned.