Arachnophobia

A feature, not a bug

One day my father-in-law brought in a black widow spider that he’d captured in the front garden, in a mason jar. He couldn’t just leave her: at the time we had a toddler living upstairs. I don’t know why he didn’t just smush her.

I am a moosh for all animals, so instead of leaving her in an unpunctured jar with a few blades of grass, I set up a little plastic terrarium with climbing sticks and a hidey tube and kept her as a pet. My wife named her Becky, the softest, most unassuming name she could think of for a dangerously venomous predator.

Becky failing, or perhaps passing, the cheese slice challenge

Black widow spiders are actually quite shy, but Becky soon stopped being scared of us, and would position herself expectantly under the top hatch whenever I opened it to dump in whatever housefly or stinkbug had unwisely invaded our home.

In the winter I would buy her feeder crickets from the pet store, which was always a fun conversation. (“Oh, what do you have?” “Black widow spider.” “Oh!”) It was a gleeful day for both of us when I scraped in the early formings of a wasps’ nest from under the patio table. Well, I’m not a moosh for all animals.

Becky lived for three years before passing from old age, becoming very much larger and quite a bit older than she would have in the front garden. But while she was still with us I wrote her into the fourth issue of my comic, still funding on Kickstarter!

Cover by Sara “Tlouey” Dudenhoeffer

Well, more or less.