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My head is pounding to the rhythm of my pulse and I see dark stars creeping in at the edges of my vision. I try to steady my breathing so I don’t pass out, but it's continuing to come in shallow spurts. My clothes cling to cold sweat. Bile is welling up into my throat but I can’t swallow it down because my mouth is a pasty desert; I swear it’s lined with cobwebs. I feel the sticky strands pulling my throat closed. I don’t want to die like this…not now…not while that thing on the floor is pretending to be dead.

The tangled ball of upturned legs lying in the middle of the bedroom appears motionless. I feel like I’ve been watching it for hours, waiting for it to twitch; but it never does. It’s the third one of those things I’ve killed this week and my nerves won’t be able to bounce back from another episode. I stare at it through the haze of my tunnel vision as I sit on the cold tiled floor, my back against the bed. God, I hate those things—the fangs, the unblinking eyes, the plump hairy bodies—but most of all, I hate the legs. I hate the way they splay out across the wall or the ceiling, just before jumping. Sometimes I can hear the big ones scurry across the living room floor during the silence between television commercials. That’s when I simply call it a night and go hyperventilate through a paper bag until I pass out cold. Tonight might be one of those nights.

My ravaged nerves plead for me to close my eyes, just for a moment. But I know that if I do, that ball of legs will somehow untangle itself and scuttle off into a dark corner, to torment me another night. The tingling sensation in my right hand reminds me that I still have my shoe in a vice grip. I let it drop and I flex my stiff fingers. After my ragged breathing starts to smooth out, I focus on taking a few deep, steady breaths. Warmth is starting to replace the tingling in my extremities. The haze clouding my vision is dissipating and I gather the courage to move. I stand up and back out of the bedroom, in slow motion, making sure I don’t look away from the mass of spindly legs, because if I do, it’ll crawl away. I leave the light on and the door wide open for the same reason. I’ll try to deal with it in the morning. Tonight I’ll be on the couch.

I round the corner to the bathroom and put my mouth to the sink faucet. The tepid tap water tastes like heaven. I look up at my pimpled face in the mirror on the medicine cabinet door. The yellow specks on the glass make me look like I have reversed freckles. My face always breaks out after a panic attack, and picking at it calms me down; it makes me feel like It's something I can control.

I focus on a mass of acne that erupted next to my nose last week and I pinch off the top layer of scab. It’s definitely getting bigger—probably infected. The sharp sting distracts my thoughts from wandering back into the bedroom—to the ball of legs. A yellow head forms at the tip and I squeeze it with my forefingers, releasing a discharge of fresh spackle at the mirror. I push hard on both sides of the purple cyst until sticky yellow custard percolates into the sink. Pain shoots into my sinus and I grip the edges of the sink. My eyes shut so hard I see a kaleidoscope of lights beneath their lids. The whole side of my cheek throbs and there’s an ache deep inside my face—definitely infected.

I press a wad of toilet paper onto the angry sore and contemplate driving to a clinic in the morning. I actually feel the inflammation pushing against my fingers—man, this is really bad. I pull the paper away to assess the damage and the tip of an ingrown hair pulls out with it. Weird place for a hair, but then I recall hearing stories of teeth and fingernails growing inside people’s bodies where they're not supposed to. Must be why King Zit, master of his fleshy domain, hasn’t healed after a week.

I pinch the end of the stiff black hair and take a deep breath. I close my eyes and prepare for pain. It’s just like pulling off a bandaid, right?  I grit my teeth, and yank.

The pain is unreal. I squint through watery eyes to see how much flesh got pulled out with it; but the hair is still protruding there—about an inch longer now—but still there. I feel spasms deep in my sinus and the hair begins to slowly draw itself back into the swollen mass of pimples. I quickly grab the end of it with my forefinger and thumb, and it pulls against me. I feel it bend at an angle under my fingertips. Gotta stay calm. With my free hand, I fumble through the medicine cabinet for tweezers. I clamp them down at the base of the hair and pull two more inches of it out of my face. The base of it is thicker and courser than any hair I’ve ever seen.

Another section of it bends and the whole length of the strand twitches wildly like a black skeleton finger. No no no no no this can’t be real! I push my thumb into my mouth near the gum line, against the underside of the cyst, and the flesh pulsates. Whatever the hell's in there has to come out! I press hard with my thumb while pulling with the tweezers. Another thick hair works its way out of the wound, then two more. Then, I see something wet and black deep inside, with tiny unblinking orbs that peer at me from the mirror. It’s a…it’s one of them!

My tweezers are trembling so badly that they lose their grip, and the black thing begins slipping back into the hole in my face. No no no no no! I plunge the tweezers into the cyst and scrape at the inflamed tissue. The pain is making me woozy but I continue to widen the cavity. I soon realize just how badly infected it had become as the tweezers puncture a deep pocket of septic pus. Some sprays into my eye, the rest of it bathes my reflection in dark browns and greens. The tweezers slip from my wet, trembling fingers, so I continue digging with my fingernails. I’m growing feint from the pain and the pungent odor of sepsis, and I’m starting to see those dark twinkling stars creep back into my vision. C'mon can’t feint gotta stay awake. I dig and scrape until I feel a hardness—

There it is! I try to scoop the hard black thing with my nails but it’s so slick and sticky that I can’t get ahold of it. I feel it clawing further into my sinus. Can’t let it go deeper! I continue pressing my thumb against the inside of my cheek until it tears through the outside of the cyst. A tangle of black legs gets pushed out with my thumb.

The spider unfolds itself from the wreckage of my cheek. Its legs splay across the side of my face from chin to forehead as the black body emerges from the open cyst. All I can do is tremble as the nightmare unfolds in the mirror. Do something…I’m going to die! I grip the sides of the sink and heave myself headfirst into the mirror. The spider moves faster than me, and scurries up into my hair. I’m dizzy and the dark stars in my head suddenly explode to white. The spider continues down the back of my head and I feel its awful legs clamp onto my neck. I can’t move. I'm frozen! I can only brace myself with the sides of the sink and stare down at the kaleidoscope of broken glass and gore. I watch helplessly as the pulsating mass of sticky yellow custard that spilled from my pimple splits into a thousand tiny legs—each one scampering from its egg sac and up my arms. This isn't happening this isn't h—

There's a sharp sting at the back of my neck, and I gasp for breath. The spider loosens its horrible grip and crawls under my shirt where its dark and moist with sweat. It clings to me there, stroking its slick body across my skin as if massaging the poison into the flesh. The hot venom burns its way down my spine. My body becomes weak and rigid, and my labored breath becomes a whistle in my collapsing throat. Vomit fills my esophagus, with nowhere to go. I only make it a couple of steps into the hallway before collapsing.

I'm lying on my stomach, paralyzed, with my head facing the bedroom. I watch with unblinking eyes as the ball of upturned legs lying in the middle of the floor untangles itself and crawls toward me. I hear its legs scuttling across the tile in the silence between my heartbeats.