A Murder Mystery

It wasn’t until late Friday evening that we became aware of the outbreak, and by then it was too late. The window for containment – the containment of whatever it was that we were dealing with – was closed, but still we went through the motions of containing it.

Zero Zero was the first to go. He was a gorgeous arboreal avicularia versicolor we’d had for four years and oh, he was my pride and joy, so much so I’d had his name tattooed across my back.

We found him Friday just after the evening news, with his legs curled up beneath him and largely unresponsive, looking like the new Goliath looked when she’d arrived.

Madame Guillotine was next, and then Soma Bath, and then Astrid and Poppy Day. And Lucifer Landed, well, she was still twitching as I laid her out on copy paper to poke and to prod for mites or fleas – for anything that might explain what was killing all the spiders.

This Way to the Anders Museum!

Twenty years have passed since the glory days of the Anders Museum.

Back then, it was really a labor of love for the three of us: me, my brother, and some kid named Eric who lived down the street. Anders wasn’t actually Eric’s last name, but he’d given up his museum naming rights in exchange for the official title of “Lead Snake Wrangler,”  which was an irresistibly impressive title to a nine-year old.

And over the door of my parents’ garage, we put up a sign that read, “Museo de Anders,” which we thought was Latin but turned out to be Spanish. We charged the neighbors four bits to come inside.

Now, what that four bits bought you was a chance to have a peek at some of the coolest animals native to the Texas Gulf coast region.  We had snakes! We had toads! We had turtles of every kind: big red ear sliders and little red ear sliders, alligator snapping turtles, three-toed box turtles, and soft shells. You could also see a lizard, some garden spiders, Eric’s pet gerbil, and the bones of a cat we’d accidentally dug up in our back yard.

Saint Athanasius... On Sainthood

(Translated from the original Syriac manuscript)

Water.

¹The true saint holds on to no desire for hydration.  Although water shall be offered, the true saint goes without, for the Lord satisfies all needs through ambient humidity.

²Blessed be the one who knows this and blessed be the one who lurks silently in the corner of the cage, disinterested, grooming fangs and pedipalps, oblivious to the giant fingertips that shove bottle caps of water up to the door, day after day after day.

³The giant fingertips shall smell of jalapeño peppers, of Sharpie markers, and of sin. The true saint shall not be tempted, for the true saint hath no olfactory sense organs with which to smell. The Lord is great, and provides all that is needed and nothing more.  

Sober

I am sitting on a mattress. The mattress is on the floor. The floor is in my apartment.

I am sitting here on this mattress and I am watching a tarantula. The tarantula is inside a plastic box. The plastic box is on the floor in my apartment, like my mattress is.

This plastic box, it is clear like an aquarium. It is not an aquarium, but it’s close enough, you know? You know what I mean.

I have convinced myself that the tarantula is preparing to molt. Any minute now, it is going to flip itself onto its back and then climb right out of its old skin. In my head, this is what I am telling myself. This molt is going to happen. I just need to keep watching.

There’s a World Going On Underground

Finding that cricket was the important thing. It was the turning point, the morale boost I’d been needing for several days.

It’s funny how that works, idn’t it? How something so small – as literally and figuratively insignificant as a cricket – can loom so large, psychologically speaking. How it can make its appearance and save the day at just precisely the right moment.

I mean… a cricket!

But it was 2 a.m., and me and Dwayne the Security Guard and Marty the Residentially-Disadvantaged Cripple were taking turns with the flashlight in the tunnels beneath downtown Houston, trying to find somewhere with a shower in it. And that’s when I saw the cricket.

And so I hooted and I hollered and I snatched the little hopping dude up off the ground before Dwayne or Marty knew what was going on, really, and then we found us a little spot at the bottom of a stairwell a little ways down from there. Dwayne and I stretched out our legs and we touched feet to form four walls of blue jeans all around that cricket, so he couldn’t hop away.

And then I reached into my backpack and I pulled out this little box. I opened it. It was just a little box like had probably housed a necklace or… you know, something like that, originally. I cupped my hand over the hairy thing inside, lifted it and I set it down in the general vicinity of the cricket I’d caught.

And there she was! Saint Athanasius the tarantula.

Despite their being right next to each other now, the cricket did not seem to take any notice of Saint Athanasius, and Saint Athanasius did not seem to take any notice of the cricket. This cricket I’d caught, who was, theoretically speaking anyway, Saint Athanasius’ dinner.

The cricket wandered off and away, and I tried to corral it back towards Saint Anastasius with a ball point pen. I had the ball point pen, I mean. Not the spider. Dwayne the Security Guard and Marty the Residentially-Disadvantaged Cripple kept their eyes fixed on the tarantula at all times.

“So,” Dwayne said, never moving his eyes from the spider. “What I don’t understand is, aren’t you married to two people? If one kicks you out, can’t you just go live with the other one?”

The cricket was hiding from me directly beneath Saint Athanasius’ many legs. Saint Athanasius herself, honed by millions of years of evolution to be efficient and brutal predator, was lifting individual legs – first this one, then that, then that, and so forth – so as to avoid touching the cricket. Hell, the cricket was the safest living thing around there. At this rate, I was going to die sooner than that cricket.

I said, “Well, there’s the rub, Dwayne. I tried that.”

I said, “Dana kicks me out for a week or two at a time once, maybe twice a year. Sometimes more, sometimes less, all depending on what it is she’s caught me smoking. But this time! This time, I figured HEY! I have a back-up ball-and-chain! You know?”

Saint Athanasius was very, very slo-o-o-owly – almost imperceptibly, really – going through some sort of extremely convoluted exercise with all her legs to make her way away from the cricket. Although I couldn’t be sure, the cricket looked to be attempting to give chase surreptitiously.

I said, “So I did what any good spouse would do. I headed over to Aesop and Anthony’s house. I walked right in and I called out, ‘Honey! I’m home!’ Just like it was Ozzie and Harriet or the Cleavers or… whatever… The Huxtables, maybe…”

When the cricket brushed up against Saint Athanasius this time, the tarantula sunk a quick fang into it, tagging and then releasing it. You ask me, I think she just wanted the cricket to leave her alone and hoped this non-lethal injury would end the matter.

But the cricket, he seemed eager. He came back around, basically harassing the spider now.

I said, “And what does my husband of four months – four months! I mean, we’re newlyweds! Newlyweds! – What’s he say to me in response? Hmm?”

My companions… I don’t even think they heard what I was saying by this point. Which is just as well, really, because I was mostly talking just to get it out and not to be heard. The wheels on Marty the Residentially-Disadvantaged Cripple’s wheelchair squeaked a little as he pushed himself closer to the vermin between my legs…

I said, “My husband, Aesop, says to me, ‘You can’t just move in here, Katy! This is my home with Anthony. This is our home, not a college dorm’.”

Everything was still for a second or two, and then Saint Athanasius made her move. She hopped and then a couple of her legs and a couple of the other things that looked like legs cupped the cricket as she sank her fangs deep into it. And that cricket, why, he twitched for the last time and then turned white and sort of crumpled in upon himself.

Now, me, I’d seen it a hundred times or more, but Dwayne the Security Guard and Marty the Residentially-Disadvantaged Cripple, they were most mesmerized by the show, so I kept right on talking.

I said, “My own husband! Won’t let me stay with him on account of his homosexual relationship!”

I said, “I tell you, this is yet another prime example of how gay marriage is undermining traditional heterosexual marriage in this country…”

The show was over. Saint Athanasius was finishing off the cricket and I was finishing off my story. I was back to thinking about finding somewhere to take a shower. As it turns out, daily showers are the biggest hurdle to my living permanently in a sort of gypsy state, as a land pirate or such…

As I set Saint Athanasius back in her box and her box back in my backpack, it hit me: “Gyms!”

I said, “All those big law firms have gyms in them. And where there’s gyms, there’s showers! And where there’s showers, there’s a way for me to stop stinking like this…”

Dwayne the Security Guard held the flashlight as we came to a crossroads in the tunnels. “Which one d’ya think, little lady? Haynes & Boone? Baker Botts?”

I chose a direction, sort of randomly, and off we went. Dwayne the Security Guard. Marty the Residentially-Disadvantaged Cripple. And me.

Oh, and Saint Athanasius, too, of course.

Discursives, 13/01/2011

Escalator FAIL

It occurs to me now that I definitely hold thin people to a higher standard than I hold fat people when it comes to… escalators.

Because when a fat person is ahead of me on an escalator and just stands there, refusing to budge and holding up the ascent of everyone else behind him, I just dismiss it as a side effect of his fatitude. “Oh, well. He’s enormous. He couldn’t possibly take a step UP!”

But if a thin person were to do the exact same thing, why, I would… I would…

Actually, I’d probably peer around him to check and make sure he wasn’t tremendously old, or disabled in some way.

*          *          *          *          *

It turns out that the Giffords shooter out in Arizona was simply a creepy, mentally unbalanced wacko, unaffiliated with any group or school of thought.

Of course, this can only mean that the next couple of weeks are going to be even more awkward than usual for all of us creepy, mentally unbalanced wackos. Lots of unnecessary calls in to the FBI by the neighbors and so forth…

Mug shot FAIL

Why, oh why couldn’t the shooter have been the world’s #1 fan of the Ramones or a goddamn MORMON or something? Those Muslims seem to really be falling down on the job this year.

Anything that would allow the rest of us to lay the blame on some identifiable group of people publicly would suffice.

Thanks a lot, Loughner! Now I’m going to have to constantly secure alibis for my whereabouts…

*          *          *          *          *

Can you see my heart bursting with pride as I type this?

All of us in the Anders household are especially proud right now. That’s because we have a new addition to our household: a female Oklahoma brown tarantula named Saint Athanasius.

Now, before you go feeling sorry for the tarantula, whining, “But Katy! She’ll never learn to respond to a name like ‘Athanasius’!” there are a couple things you probably ought to know.

First, best that all them scientist types can figure, tarantulas have no sense of hearing at all. As in, they have no organs with which to hear.

They can also only see what is less than half an inch in front of their eyes, can split wide open if they fall off a rock, and generally do not travel more than a couple feet from wherever they were born in their lifetime.

In fact, it’s safe to say that fundamentalist Christians really ought to latch on to tarantulas as the Achilles heel of the whole evolutionary “survival-of-the-fittest” theory.

I mean, is everything I learned from old monster movies wrong?

Tarantula FAIL