The Tale of the Basement Beast

Once upon a time it was late at night and I was tired. I rose wearily to close my door before going to bed and caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. Prone to hallucination, I knew it was probably nothing, but I ventured a half-glance in that general direction and saw...nothing. I would have just gone to bed but suddenly my skin was crawling and an unmistakable crittery feeling came over me, so I investigated further. I pulled a box away from the wall and there she was: A very large spider. I shall call her Big Bertha. BB froze. I froze. A tumbleweed rolled lazily by. It was a standoff—Both parties contemplating the next move. I had an important decision to make and I had to make it fast, because as every spider hater knows, the only thing worse than the thing actually crawling on you is for it to disappear....for what we can't see is what we fear most, no? And as previously mentioned, the movement I saw was a 'flash' so I knew how fast the sucker could move. The situation obviously called for a certain, swift death. At this point, please allow a flashback (I want you to grasp the full scope of my imagination and the gravity it lends to the battle at hand.)
In junior high, my friend Candice and her sister Jessica underwent a similar battle with a beast in their basement. Jessica mustered up the courage to smash it with a shoe but left the shoe there and ran away. But when they went back and lifted up the shoe...BABIES went running out everywhere! Babies spilling out everywhere...I still have nightmares, and I wasn't even there.

So you can understand my hesitation at just going all warrior-crazy with a big boot or something. Thankfully, at the moment when I needed it most, I remembered a time-honored method first taught to me by another fem fatale friend, Val: Hairspray. Immobilizing my enemy seemed the only solution.

I raced upstairs to my hairstylist-friend's room (man, I have a lot of helpful friends!) to seize the aerosol hairspray and raced back downstairs, thankful that BB hadn't budged. Armed with a shoe in one hand and the deadly toxin in the other, I attacked. BB panicked and started running toward me, quick as lightning...But slowly she, well, slowed down until she was stuck, mid-scamper. Whereupon I bopped her with my shoe--not even hard enough to dislodge the babies she allegedly carried on her back. A perfect, Bertha-shaped splat remained on the sole of my shoe, with the length of her leg span as my only proof of her full size. The end.

Or so I thought. Battle with a new Bertha commenced last night. This one was not so quick to slow down (maybe I was cocky about my hairspray skills) and she ran under my bed, so I had to sleep on the couch upstairs. I smell a phone call to the exterminator. Sometimes you have to call in the general when the mere foot soldier exhausts her strength.