The Spider Problem

Springfield Bros.

PEST CONTROL

No creature too large

Unordinary or unusual

We handle anything

Call 946-7378

Avery read the listing again.

She stood from the kitchen table, abandoning her crossword and her cold coffee, and pushed aside the old lace curtains to peer out of the window at the barn.

Something really had to be done.

She sighed heavily and pinched the bridge of her nose. Then she picked up the phone—an old, tan plastic one that hung on the wall with a long twisty cord dangling like a loose thread—and dialed the number.

She hoped they'd be able to solve the spider problem.

~~~

The problem had started small (as problems often do). Nothing more bothersome than a cobweb in a corner, easily brushed away or ignored. It only really became noticeable with the rats. But Avery and her parents didn't think much of it, back then. Honestly, fewer rats in the barn was hardly considered a problem.

"Even better than a cat," her dad had even said. He rubbed his hands together with an excited glint in his eye.

Avery hadn't liked seeing the rats' sad, lifeless little bodies scattered about in the straw, but she wasn't one to argue. And it was true—none of the sacks of corn meal had been gnawed through this year.

But then it was the chickens.

And the old goose.

Her mother had been devastated about Gertie. That goose was the closest thing to a pet that they had on the farm. Every other animal on the farm was there to turn a profit, but somehow her mother had convinced her father that Gertie could stay long after her egg-laying years had passed.

They had moved the animals out of the barn after that. There was another barn; newer, but further from the house and a bit smaller. But it was roomy enough once they moved the tractor out. It was her dad's idea to put the tractor in the old barn instead. "Can't do nothin' to a tractor," he had said with a grin, like he was the cleverest man in the world.

After that, it was fine for a while; they could almost pretend there wasn't a problem at all. But then there was a big storm, and the barn doors blew off in the night. The pigs had gotten out, and wandered back to their familiar spot in the old barn.

At that point, her father had been livid. He had already negotiated a price for all those pigs, and Avery knew all he saw as he marched up to the barn with his shotgun was the dollar signs dropping out of their bank account. She and her mother watched from the kitchen window, her mother biting her nails the entire time. They heard two shots, but nothing else.

They waited in uncomfortable silence for a long while, and then Avery started bustling around the kitchen preparing dinner. She didn't know what else to do, and her mother seemed too shocked to do anything but sit at the kitchen table and stare. She barely touched the food Avery placed in front of her, and didn't say anything more before she went up to bed.

The next morning, early, before her mother usually woke up, Avery crept out of the quiet house across the dirt path to the old barn and peered inside a window. The rafters were crisscrossed with webs and there were two desiccated faces yawning at her from the highest beam. She could see her dad's overalls on one, and a hint of her mother's lacy nightgown on the other, wrapped tidily in thick, silky threads. Her mother must have walked over in the middle of the night. The spider was always most active then. Now Avery could see it scuttling around the hayloft, clearing out the old webs. The brown and yellow legs were as thick as fence posts and the bulbous brown body was the size of the tractor. Clearly it had been feeding well.

For a while, Avery did the bare minimum to get by. It was easy now; without the chickens there were no more eggs to collect, without the pigs there was no food trough to fill.

As for her parents. She couldn't even cry. The tears wouldn't come. Sometimes she was just too angry at them. That her mother could just choose to walk in there willingly. More than once Avery about doing the exact same thing. But then she would imagine the shiny mandibles descending and she couldn't do it.

So the only thing left to do was carry on. And to do that she needed to get the barn back.

And that's how Avery found herself scouring the classifieds.

"No creature too large, eh?" she said, when she circled the listing. She hadn't yet stopped saying what she was thinking out loud, even though there was no one to hear her anymore. She had picked up the habit from her mother, who could have talked the feathers off a chicken.

"We'll see about that." She wasn't trying too hard to stop, not yet anyway.

It broke up the silence at least.

~~~

A dingy old blue Ford Bronco drove up the long dirt road. The Springfield brothers were both over six feet tall, and muscular, surprisingly so, for pest control workers.

"You're sure about this?" Avery said as they pulled tanks from the back of the truck and slung them across their backs. They looked a little like the Ghostbusters, with their gas masks and long sprayer wands attached to the tanks on their backpack. "It's a really big spider."

"Nothin' we can't handle," the shorter one said with a confident swagger.

She watched from the kitchen window as they lifted the heavy wooden drop bar and entered the barn, but then she turned away. She didn't want to be waiting like she had with her father. So she busied herself around the house, and tried not to think about it. She continued to not think about it, pointedly did not think about it, even as the sunlight slowly faded and there was still no knock on the door, no sign of them emerging from the barn.

The next morning, she finally decided to check. The Bronco was still there, "SP INGFIELD BROS PE T CONTROL" peeling off the side. Inside the barn, it was almost the same as the last time she had dared to look inside. One of the sprayer tanks was askew on the floor, the other one dangling precariously from its owner's corpse, suspended from the ceiling.

Avery sighed and massaged her temples. This was going to be even more difficult than she originally thought.

She crossed the yard back to the house and pulled the newspaper pages out from a drawer and spread them out on the table. She drew a line through the Springfield Bros listing and flipped the page over to find the next one.