Gunther
One of my biggest fears about leaving home and coming to a far away island in the south pacific had nothing to do with leaving behind the usual comforts of home, but rather more to do with what I was going to encounter here. When I first got to Santo I quickly took to scanning my environment at all times and checking every inch around where I was. To the locals I looked extremely paranoid; to me it just became a precautionary ritual I adopted into my life everywhere I went. It was almost like breathing, I didn’t stop to think about it, I automatically just did it.
One day Chelsea and I were leaving our hut and I happened to look up. Outside of our hut hung across from our roof to a nearby tree was a huge spider. The web was probably about ten feet up so it wasn’t like the spider was very close, but still, this big yellow butt with eight red legs was still too close to comfort in my books. I pointed it up to Chelsea and she laughed at the fact that I had actually noticed it up there. I quickly let Chelsea know that his (to clarify, yes, I am referring to the spider) name would be Gunther. She laughed at me again and then she told me that she had named previous spiders too just so that she wasn’t as afraid of them. At that moment I was really glad that I had traveled half way across the world only to land in the same country as a girl as quirky and strange as me. Then she went around the hut and asked Rosaline if she would mind killing a spider for us.
Rosaline marched around the hut and looked up at the spider. She grabbed a big stick to smack it down and before she could even get close to the web I had ran off far away so that there wasn’t any chance that the ferocious Gunther would land on me. A minute later Chelsea called me and let me know that the coast was clear and I was okay to come back. I shuddered and headed back around to the front of our hut. I looked down at the remains of the spider which was basically just legs. One of the legs twitched and I moaned loudly. Chelsea who had been watching my facial expression explained to me that Rosaline had knocked Gunther down and then squished it’s body between her fingers and that the twitching leg was just a nerve and that it was 100% dead.
I carefully eyed the remains. As I did so, something utterly disturbing and frightening happened; the twitch in the one leg turned into a twitch in all eight. Then, like out of the movies, the legs pulled themselves up and planted themselves on the ground and actually started crawling! I screamed loudly and turned around and ran in the direction I had come. Chelsea ran into the other direction laughing in disbelief at what we had just witnessed. Luckily Chelsea saved the day and went back over to the half dead, half alive corpse and repeatedly stepped on it before burying it with dirt.
It took me a day and a half before I would even walk to our hut on the side where Gunther had been killed. He must have been pretty livid with me to actually work up the strength to come back to life just to give me one last scare. I figure he was probably upset that I had taken the time to name him only to have Rosaline attempt to slaughter him. Still I continue to carefully check my surroundings and to give ridiculous names to any spiders I come across. So far the only one besides Gunther to give me a good scare was Chester. Chester was a big black spider hanging out beside the door in Josiah and Markus’s hut. I sat on the floor in tears for probably like twenty minutes before I could work up the courage to even leave their hut. Generally the spiders mind their own business though. They are actually pretty afraid of us and if you even come close to one they scurry off. Gunther was the only spider that ever had a bone to pick with me, and I learned pretty quickly from him. Now I either just let them live and try my best to ignore them, or if I feel like it must be killed I make sure they’re actually dead before re-entering the scene of the murder.
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