when i was a kid there was a big spider that lived in our kitchen. we called it a wolf spider bc we had some in the cellar, but probably it was a giant european house spider. also my mom worked for the county newspaper, where she wrote a featured front-page column every sunday. more on that later. i named the spider something very silly, a completely made up word (can't say the name bc it could doxx me) and one winter morning our furnace was broken and the Furnace Guy came to fix it. me and my siblings were sat in the kitchen eating breakfast before school when he walked in the door (we used the kitchen door as our main entrance instead of the actual front door) and while he was talking to my mom, our spider skittered out from under a counter. he went "WOAH THAT'S HUGE!" and as we all yelled "NO" in an instant but what felt like slow motion, he killed our spider with one stomp.
i immediately began wailing and my siblings were themselves in uproar. the guy was mortified. i guess if you crawl around in cellar furnaces for a living, stomping spiders might become deeply instinctual to you. but i think he might have began to second-guess himself after that.
already he was deeply apologetic. you could tell he felt really bad for what he'd done and that perhaps he was reconsidering his stomp-stance on spiders. so to this day i become almost hysterical with laughter when i imagine what he must have felt picking up the newspaper from his front steps that next weekend, the special, full-color sunday issue with all the extra content, to see the front-page, left-hand column, a Eulogy to our spider.
