I met my mother and sister in Seattle. Mom had heard of a retirement community she was researching for future purposes. This place was condos built in among cemetery plots. You could buy the condo and be buried in your back yard. And these weren't just any old square chunk of lawn cemetery plots. One of them was a tiny rounded scoop of land about the size of a small dining room table, surrounded by picturesquely moss-covered gray stone. The moss almost disguised the somewhat ominous, jagged, tooth-like sharpness of the ring. Almost. But the focal point was an ancient looking gray headstone with a lovely hand-carved inscription. Another plot, an empty one attached to the three story split-level condo my mother fancied, included a small gold-fish pond surrounded by... turtles... dozens of tennis ball to salad plate sized turtles in pale pink and oxidized-copper green, all kind of piled around and over each other to form the decorative edge of the pond. And as we viewed all of this somewhat eccentric luxury in the golden light of a summer afternoon, something stirred in the goldfish pond. While my mother and sister went to take another look at the condo, and at the map to decide how best to get back to their hotel, I bent over the pond to investigate.
And from the murky, jade green depths arose a strange, glistening spider, bigger than my hand, covered with actually quite beautiful soft, golden hairs. Its abdomen was housed in a delicate, iridescent shell, a plump round spiral like a giant land snail's, with an ivory lip and an exterior streaked with pink and aquamarine and silver and canary yellow. A strange, floaty membrane like the mantle of a cuttlefish pulsed around the opening, and undulated gently as the spider rose to the surface of the water, it's eyes glistening like emeralds and sapphires.
Then the god-damned thing KEPT RISING. It hovered majestically over the surface of its little pond, drip drying in the warmth of the sunlight that scintillated off of shell and hairs and softly dripping water. Then it started to FLY AROUND THE YARD, zipping faster and faster to catch flies and darting down the grass to scamper like a hermit crab on cocaine, then leap like a huge jumping spider onto tiny mice hiding in the grass. I started calling for my mom and sister to come and see this, because there was NO WAY I was letting my mother move to a place where the spiders not only skittered and jumped, but swam and FREAKIN' FLEW. not to mention that they came with armor. But the darn thing sank lazily back into the pond as they came to see what I was yelling for, and they absolutely wouldn't believe me, and I absoLUTEly wasn't fishing around for the thing with my bare hands.
We went and looked into the house some more, and then I got lost trying to drive us back to the hotel. I was just too blown away by the creature who completely eclipsed the strangeness of retirement condos built around a cemetery designed to resemble a luxury miniature golf course.
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