Gup, Spiders, & What Might Be Next…
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My dreaming slithered on, as I smelled woodsmoke and looked to my left to find a tall and thin gent on wooden stilts next to our vehicle describing a ginger-haired woman with many freckles, an Olympic boxer originally from San Juan, who said she’d thrown the first punch of the night and somehow that set a brawl off. There was yelling, cursing, and carrying on, along with chairs being tossed, but I never learned what the hell was behind said fight, though. Beer bottles were shattering on the street, and eventually I even got smacked by someone’s indigo flip-flop on my right cheek as I followed a big fellow out the back door. Who throws flip-flops these days? I wondered if that was strictly a Middle Eastern gesture of disrespect, the last time I heard of it, former President George W. Bush had a loafer tossed at him many decades ago at a press conference around the anguished time of Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a relief to get clear of New Bedford and be done with those fractious altercations.
Morphed in with all those challenges was a fact that my 40-year Guilford High class reunion was coming up at a restaurant called The Moorings, a lovely spot on the Guilford Harbor – class of 1984 we were, maybe thirty-eight or so of us left. “All those faces gathered in close proximity might be too overwhelming for you, babe,” Aimee said. “Plus, it’s an open bar, and you don’t drink a damn thing, right?”
“It’s births, graduations, weddings, and a lot of joy, no doubt, but also divorces and other setbacks and then comes death, leukemia, skin cancer, car accidents, a heart attack or three, a murder, massive fatal stroke and some suicides, oh how they tear at your gut like rabid dogs.” 
Aimee and I ate a lobster roll and a cheesy hot dog with bacon at a lovely, understated spot in Truro, when we first arrived before returning to the hotel, where we spotted a monster arachnid dangling off the balcony of the next room # 56. You see, Aimee and I had rented out Room # 55 at the Bluff Crest Hotel in Truro. It was gorgeous, the Cape sunsets and dune grass and the unending row of cottages or cabins along the Truro beachfront, there had to be at least thirty of them, spaced twelve feet apart, but were they painted white, or eggshell, or was it closer to a mint hue?
“I’d say eggshell,” she said. 
“I’ll say mint,” I said.
And so, we kissed and laughed and fooled around some more and Aimee kept unpacking, for that is how she settles herself down. Both of us stopped our chatting about the long row of cabins on the shore, and noticed the damn spider again, about two inches long with a web that had already caught two slowed-down hornets, a bunch of moths, ants, a stinkbug, and a Monarch butterfly. “Don’t mess with that one, he’ll eat us alive for fun,” Aimee said.
“Beware of the webmaster,” I said in a creepy voice.
Later in the night, that damn spider infiltrated the part of my brain called hippocampus, where fluttering visions are born. As my melancholic reverie went on, I binged on saltwater taffy we’d purchased in Dennis, Massachusetts five hours earlier. Nancy’s Candies was the original spot, but Nancy had long since retired. Aimee and I loaded up at the just opened Seaside Sweets and eventually, Aimee drifted into slumber. 
It was 3:09 a.m. and I kept eating saltwater taffy like mad and watching “American Ninja Warrior,” with the sound turned down as Aimee slept peacefully beside me. I quietly practiced my reading from my novel, Wolf-Boy for the next late afternoon in Provincetown and finished my fifteenth piece of taffy and I felt nauseous and bloated. I drifted into a fitful sleep until a spider the size of a heifer was on my back after he’d busted down the hotel door and devoured my left ear, cheek, and neck. He’d expanded like some crazy growth which soon transformed into an old James Bond villain, Jaws in Roger Moore’s 007 in his 1979 Moonraker. The character’s name was Hugo Drax, played with a ferocity by French actor Michael Lonsdale.