And you don't like spiders and you certainly don't like spider webs and so you lift your arm to your face to pull it away and your hand bumps the wadded up handkerchief in your pocket which your girlfriend calls a snotrag which is in your pocket because you have one of those very frustrating summer colds that comes out of nowhere and makes you miserable and depressed and the only thing that can pull you out of it is certainly not calculus but a game or two of Doom on the internet, and when you lift your arm you can feel the strand on your bicep too, which is a bit sore from lifting too much in front of your rather unattractive blond physical education teacher, whom you wanted to impress even if she has a face that looks like it was cut out of stone, and so you simultaneously pick at the strand on your face with one hand and the strand on your arm with the other, and now it's on both of your arms and you haven't even stopped walking yet.

And so you stop briefly and make shrugging motions with your shoulder and now you can feel two or maybe three strands of web on your face which is very disconcerting but since it's getting dark and no one is on campus you can rub your forehead a little more frantically because there seems to be some web there too and you can feel it on your neck and really it's on your arms all over the place now. Your hand is wiping at your neck and your other hand is making scraping motions on your cheek and you're rubbing your bicep on your chest and wriggling your legs because you can feel the webby strands on your legs too.

Which means you might have something amusing to tell your buddies in the computer center about how your were attacked by a spider even though you know that there is no way any spider would stick around after somebody four hundred times its size ripped its web to pieces, a fact your girlfriend will undoubtedly point out to you when you tell her about it instead of asking you if your are okay even though it's a silly question, you'd still like to hear it once in a while. And now the web is on your arms and legs and and it's on your face and for crying out loud you can feel it in your mouth on your tongue.

And then images of various spiders come to your mind and that makes it worse like the one you saw in the flower bed in the parking lot next to Hy-Vee when you were there with your buddies and everyone was talking about that girl who works at the computer center, the one with nice legs and she always wears shorts that make her legs look longer and willowy and she has long curly red hair. And you were on the verge of telling them how you often think about her when you're in your weight training class and it's not because of her legs but because of her laugh and that's when you saw the spider, a brown one with white spots and sharp little legs that just seemed to hang off its fat body as it swung from a spider strand attached to a carnation or a mum.

And now your thrashing your arms around and rubbing your thighs together and whipping your head back and forth to get it out of your hair it's in your eyebrows oh my god it's in your eyes and that must be one big fucking spider and what's that on your back. It's on your back it's on your back quick rip off your shirt there it pull it off oh god your shirt is sticking to your back because you're sweaty and now you're whipping your head around and your shirt is up around your armpits and you need to get your snotrag because your nose is running like a sieve and there's snot on your cheeks and there's web on your face and and you can feel the strands around your neck and what's that on your chest take your shirt off you've got it around your head now everything's completely dark and you can smell your sweat in the shirt and snot and soil and you don't know what that others smell is maybe it's spider web smell maybe it's what a spider smells like and what's that in your hair quick take you shirt off.

There it's off but you've got web on your chest and you can feel it on your back and this is just like that dream you had where you were walking down the middle of the street because you knew there would never be a spider web in the middle of the god damned street but your dreams have always had a way of frustrating you and proving you wrong and now it's on your stomach you can feel it pulling on the small of your back and on your bony spinal column and in the dream there was a big fucking web right in the middle of the street and before you could stop walking towards it the wind blew it off the street lamps and it got on you and it was horrible and you woke up and you threw the sheets off your bed for what seemed like half and hour but was only two seconds and even thought you about had a heart attack you knew you could still walk in the street.

So you try to stumble towards the street because it's Sunday night and it's dark an no one is on campus and your girlfriend wouldn't even care she's incapable of jealousy if she knew you weren't going to the library to study and you weren't even going to the computer center but you were actually going to meet that girl because you followed her home one night and you know where she lives and you go over there often although nothing has happened, not yet anyway and maybe you won't be the last one to get to the computer center and maybe one of your buddies will see you flailing around and he'll think you're having some sort of bad trip or a heroin overdose but you don't care because the spider wasn't in your shirt it was in your pants it is in your pants you can feel it and that's why there's so many webs on you because it keeps making more they're on your knees they're on your shins and you can feel it running through your shorts take off your pants take them off take them off.

Dancing on one foot you're in the middle of the street on the edge of the shadow where the street light doesn't quite go and you feel more webs on your back on your face on your head and you need more arms to brush them off and take off your shorts you're hopping it's stuck on one shoe fuck pull off the shoe too just make sure you check it before you put it back on because spiders love to crawl in shoes and remember when your girlfriend found the big dead spider in her slipper and she didn't freak out at all for god's sake she picked it up with her fingers and casually flung it in the trash can like she did that sort of thing everyday your shoe is off your pants are around one leg and for crying out loud goddammit goddammit the damn thing is in your underwear there's webs on your whole body in your hair on your face on your in your shoes on your shorts your tripping over your shirt in the middle of the street fuck them they're old underwear anyway yank them off rip them off you can just wear the shorts afterwards just get that goddamn spider off you can't you get it off you please for the love of god get it off your body.

It's a Sunday night in September you are wearing a shoe and two socks and you are running around in little circles and dancing and tripping and what the hell is that noise it's you you're screaming because there's a god damned army of little tiny spiders and great big spiders in you hair you can feel them between the hairs on your legs and and on your arms and you swear to god that if you had a knife you'd shave them all off and that's what bactine is for. Mandy her name is Mandy and when you were over at her house at her apartment in her bedroom looking at her collection of snow globes there was a spider on the wall and it was a just a little hair of a spider and really no big deal but she sucked in her breath and made a little noise in the back of her throat that made you feel about ten feet tall and then she grabbed your arm and didn't say anything as she stared at it with wide eyes and you very casually used all those weight training muscles to smash it flat with one of her shoes and then you handed the shoe to her and she looked you in the eyes and that was that, oh yes it was and that was all it had to be. No don't run over to the tree there might be more webs scratch yourself on the pavement yes on the asphalt god the air is colder than you though but the pavement is still warm and you can smell the tar and the dirt and the asphalt and you're wriggling on it like some sort of fire safety advertisement except you're not on fire your covered with spider webs.

You can feel a burning on your back it's the road your scraping off the spiders that's good your getting them the webs are going too and maybe you banged your a head a little on the pavement you can taste blood in your mouth but no spiders the spider stink is going away you can smell them leaving they're going there they go and there's a little left on your legs scrape it off kick it off your shoes just came off it's in the gutter next to your shirt there it is next to your shorts and your arm hurts quite hitting it on the pavement quit quit quit it there.

Breathe. You were screaming. Breathe. Deep breath. The air near the ground is warm. Close your eyes, hold them shut. They're gone. Stand up. Get your shorts. Put them on, no one is looking. Get your shirt. Christ what a mess. Put it on, dust it off. Careful! Don't sit on the curb, sit in the middle of the street. Put on your shoes. Tie the laces, tight. Fat laces. New laces. White laces.

Wipe off your face. There's your underwear. Ripped. Leave it. You can get it on your way home. You will tell your girlfriend something, anything. She won't believe you. She never does.

Who cares.