Shayla and Uncle Lenny

Uncle Lenny wanted to read me a bedtime story…

“Oh yeah, I forgot to introduce you to Shayla.” Caesar said casually as he walked me through his house. He would be gone for ten days and needed someone to feed his five cats. I needed a place to stay while Fred did the fiberglassing inside the boat, so it worked out perfectly for both of us.

“Shayla?” I replied. I’d never heard him mention her before. I followed him into the bathroom. He moved the hanging shower receptacle and out crawled a large, hairy brown spider.

“Well, I’m glad you introduced us.” I smiled. “She might have surprised me.”

“She’s cool.” He said. “She won’t bother you.”

Nearly a week of house-sitting had passed and I was fairly relieved that there had been no sightings of Shayla. The cats woke me at dawn, insistently hungry despite the splayed entrails of rats and geckos in and around the house. I worked long hours in the yard aboard Swell each day, then cruised back to the house in Cesar’s beat-to-hell 1980s Ford Fiesta for a long hot shower. It sure beat crouching on the piece of wood under the hose spigot in the V.I.P. yard…

One night I returned in a haze of exhaustion. After feeding Mimi, Plumette, Mostique, Pichum, and Tita, I went into the bedroom to let down the mosquito net and crawl into bed. As I untied the wad of netting, I got the eerie feeling that someone was watching me. I turned. Six inches from my face, a MASSIVE hairy brown spider–much resembling Shayla–clung motionless to the wall. I nearly leapt out of my skin in a shriek of terror. In fact, this was NOT Shayla. This was Shayla’s Big Uncle Lenny…three times her size!! I wasn’t sure if he, too, was a friend of Cesar, but there was no way I was sharing the bedroom with him. I coaxed him gently towards the door with a broom where he made a fantastic leap across the doorframe and crawled off into the shadows. I tucked the mosquito net extra tightly around the edges of the bed, crawled in, and tried my best to think of rainbows and turquoise and ice cream and perfect barreling rights…