The Spider

Read More

About last year, my mother told me a story about her and her friends with all the trouble they got…

About last year, my mother told me a story about her and her friends with all the trouble they got into.

My mother stated after she had picked me up from a park, “I know you like hanging out with your friends. However, I was 13 too. I know that you’ll want to have fun, and they may lead you to places you don’t want to be, such as stranded in field with your friends and no way to contact anybody. – leaving them all to worry about you.” The stranded in the field part threw me.

“Why a field?” I had asked thinking that it was just something she had thrown in to make me worried.

“Because my friends and me ended up stranded in a field one night,” she told me shrugging. I can remember looking up at her with this big blank expression before I started begging her to tell me the story. At first, my mother refused to tell the story because she had said that it would change my opinion of her from the mother who was scared of nothing to the mother who had been lost in the woods with her friends because of a spider. However, something changed and a huge smile crept over her face as she began the story.

“One day, when I was about your age, my friends and I went out for a walk because we were going to see another one our friends who was grounded and couldn’t sneak out. So after going there and convincing her mother to unground her just for the day, we went off through the woods because it was a shortcut to our favorite hangout spot – this little lake that we had stumbled across on my birthday which was a couple weeks before this incident. That would have made me thirteen. So right when we arrived there, we saw this huge spider – with it’s eight huge beady eyes staring us down. It had have been bigger than my whole arm, and that was just the body. As you know, I have a fear of spiders so seeing that horrified me. It’s large, gangly legs began to move towards us making my friends and me take off through the woods, not back the way we came.

It seems like something really obvious now, but the spider kind of shut down our sense of wrong and right. We ran further into woods for who knows how long. Soon we came up to this field, and we sat down so out of breath that all we could hear for maybe a good five minutes was us trying to refill our lungs. Once we had recovered, we looked up at the sky and the sun was setting. Knowing we had to get out of there, we had panicked and tried to find our way back.

“What are we going to do now? We’re lost in the middle of the woods and the sun is about to set.” My friend had said because we couldn’t remember which side of the field we had entered.

“We keep looking. There’s bound to be something.” Another one of my friends responded trying to be optimistic. You could smell the fear at that moment because we thought that would never get because the sun was very close to setting.

“You guys, I think we’re going to have to live in the woods from now on – only surviving on animals and berries.’ I cracked the joke and only two out of the other five girls laughed. Not long after that, the sun had set, and we saw the huge light that came from a parking lot. Pointing it out to my friends, we ran that way. It turned out, we were only a couple of blocks away from home. Once we had gotten back we all were yelled at – which we had expected – and grounded – again we had expected this – because we had been gone for hours past what we said were, and we had them all so worried.

So, long story short, don’t venture into the woods, and if you do just go back the way you entered. Trust me, it keeps you out of trouble. “And away from big creepy spiders,” My mother said glancing over at me every once in awhile. Even though I wasn’t there the way she had told the story made me feel as if I was.

“Did you ever go back? To see if the spider was still there?” I asked with a small smile on my face.

“Are you kidding me? No, we never went back. Too chicken, I guess you could say. Honestly I wouldn’t want to go back. The only way someone could get me to go back there was if they dragged me kicking and screaming,” My mom said looking over to me wita h huge grin across her face.

“Did you live in St.Louis when this happened?” I inquired while looking at her.

“Yep, but not in Webster or Kirkwood. I can’t say exactly where we lived when that happened, but like I said, I had just turned thirteen so we must have been getting ready to move to Kirkwood.” My mom responded as we pulled into our driveway. That night I tried not to dream of huge spiders but failed horribly.

Submitted by Eryn, Age 14

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Verified by MonsterInsights