|
Spooky! Posted on October 28, 2009 12:00 AM MST by Tiffany Kinerson
I had no idea back then that Black Widows roamed the streets of Las Vegas as readily as they do. On walks through the neighborhood, my friend, a local, pointed out the gauzy snares wrapped and crumpled into holes, ditches, sides of mailboxes. “That,” she said, “is a Black Widow’s web.” Half-trembling, half in awe, I stared at the knot of webbing, the very image of evil’s chaos, and asked where the spider lived. “They hide in dark places and only come out at night.” My spine tingled. Another image of evil, its fear of light wrapped into a tiny poisonous creature. It’s amazing the pictures God gives us on this earth. Spiders so deadly that a person can survive only one bite. Red-painted black death that emerges only in the night. The darkness a protection for humans, a reminder of what other evils lurk beneath the sinister skies before dawn. How scary to come home after an extended absence to find over a dozen Black Widows nested around our very house. After all, by this time we had one toddler and one tiny baby who very soon would begin to crawl, to shove his fingers into tiny, dark spaces, to cram treasures—including ones with wriggling legs—into his juicy mouth. Truly it was my husband and my pleasure to take every one of these creepy crawlers out with a can of WD-40 and a lighter. Let’s incinerate the little buggers. Protect our home from evil. I giggled and jumped as I held the flashlight that night, nervous sweat oozing behind my scalp. He fired up the combustible and yelled as the season’s crickets leaped up and hit his legs—a startling reminder of the dangerous insects who could live anywhere on our property, even in places the flashlight did not illuminate. But after we finished our task, killing the dirty dozen (more or less) for good, we slept well that night. Safe and sound. The hour-glass murderers dead, the lethal demons expelled. It’s my honor and joy to lend a hand and prayer into the safety and protection of my family. There are quite a few things out in the world that are frightful: kidnappers, predators, sicknesses, injury, maybe even terrorists, catastrophic events. If I set my mind on the local channel’s news of the day, I would go numb from every image that emblazons fear into my eyes. But instead, I watch and listen to the other inherent message that God Himself gave me on the night my husband and I fought off lurking evils. “Look at the boundary,” He said. “Those spiders did not enter your house.” And no, not a one even tried. Every danger lurked only along the boundaries God’s finger drew in our foundation. Spooks and creeps may hover as much as they want, but they can only enter through the fingers of God’s hands. |
Like the final scene in an 80s horror flick, corpses littered the ground along the outside of our Las Vegas home. A dozen mangled bodies remained, encapsulated in lacy webbings and singed blades of grass. One last vestige of a night spent in terror, aiming the propellant, lighting a match and blitzing venomous demons into oblivion, one by one. By one. My husband and I had fought off the Black Widows that had claimed our exterior as their home. We had conquered the villains and re-claimed the house for our family. It was the best of times, the spookiest of times.