Landscapes for the Dead

Pillow

I'm an Australian, as some of you may know.

In primary school there was this a kid in my class who one day didn't show up, which was nothing special. Everyone didn't show up some day during the year, because of sickness of dentist appointments or other things.

Later, after he'd been missing for a few days, I found out that this particular kid was in hospital. He was in a bed with his head wrapped up in bandages. When he returned to school we got the full story.

Back then I only found the need for one pillow and that suited me fine, but this kid had two, one stacked on top of the other. He said he'd been lying there for a while after his light had been turned off. It was in the summer and he'd been pretty hot. You know that thing how you turn over the pillow to the cooler side? He'd done that. When he told us the story at school he said he remembered hearing a faint ripping sound, but I think he added in that part based on what happened after.

After lowering his head down onto the cool side of the pillow, he told us that he felt something skittering around the inside of his ear. At first he'd thought it was a fly, but it wasn't.

He'd slapped his ear down over a Black Widow spider that had decided to hide in between his two pillows.

If you've ever found a spider and trapped it under a plastic cup, you would know they tend to react one of two ways. The first is they freeze up. Like a rabbit caught in a spotlight. They don't know what's happened to them. The other kind are the aggressive ones that attack. They throw themselves at the side of the cup and skitter around inside it.

Black Widows are notorious for being aggressive.

He told us he was bit only once, which was lucky. I don't think anyone has died from a bite from a Black Widow for a while now, because if you get to the hospital on time they can do wonders for you. Being bitten more than once though, I think that would kill you pretty quickly.

He'd started screaming and clawing at his ear when he got bit, and he told us the thing had tried to escape into his ear canal. It couldn't have, though, because the doctors couldn't find anything inside. They told him that if it had gone inside his ear he most likely would have died. When I saw his ear at school it was red and slightly shiny, and his skin had been tight. You could see where he'd been bitten, it was a black mark located fairly close to the hole in his ear. Even though the spider hadn't burrowed in there, I'd say it had been close.

I don't remember much else about that kid, except that he kept picking at that black mark before it went away, making it bleed. I now sleep with two pillows. If it gets hot I always throw back the covers and turn on the fan, but I never flip over to the cool side.