Editor's Note: I wrote this for a friend who asked me to write a short piece on the Black Widow, assuming he meant the terrible, terrible spider. Later he clarified that he was referring to the Bellingham transvestite who goes by the same name - but it was too late.
Ah, the Black Widow! It is difficult to conceive of a thing more instinctively terrifying and repulsive than a Black Widow spider, barring certain names which may leap to mind in the arena of political radio. The spider's name alone is enough to inspire a shiver of disgust in the spine and a compulsive desire to be fed ice cream. It has been turned into legend at Fourth-of-July barbecues for millennia. Its picture is drawn in hieroglyphs. There are sculptures in Rome of fathers re-enacting the time a Black Widow was hiding in the toe of one of his slippers, and sculptures of their wives and children listening in gape-jawed rapture, potato chips tumbling from their mouths. The Black Widow is universally feared and hated, and this is the way it should be.
But we need to step it up.
The Black Widow has not been "misunderstood." She is not "just as afraid of you" as you of her. There is nothing going on inside her staggeringly tiny brain that deserves the misty-eyed adoration of the weird ladies who guard the Arthropod exhibits at zoos like grandmothers drifting through cat emporiums, bestowing upon tarantulas and flesh-eating beetles names like "Sir Laurence" and "Maude." In fact, there is nothing inside the Black Widow at all except a jumble of nerves, a system of glands, and a perfect replica of all the reoccurring nightmares of the entire human race.
Do you know how a black widow eats? I'll tell you how a black widow eats.
The Black Widow eats by thrusting its Nosferatu fangs into the live body of its victim, tightly bound in a straight jacket made of silk, paralyzing and saturating the body in what science magazines politely call "digestive enzymes," but which my Encyclopedia of Lies Science Told Us informs me is actually called Death Acid. The Death Acid partially dissolves the victim, and what can't be liquefied, the spider grinds into meat pudding with its enormous, H.P. Lovecraftian teeth. All of which, mind you, happens while the victim is still alive. That's how a Black Widow eats. She wraps you in cellophane, turns you into a smoothie and drinks you. The only creature that eats in a more horrific way than a Black Widow spider is a starfish - but starfish are redeemed by clinging to rocks in tide pools, being available in pastel colors, and possessing the ability to regrow their own limbs. None of which can be said for the Black Widow!
And do you know what else? The Black Widow doesn't even deserve to be called a widow. The word widow evokes a certain sympathy, a certain painful understanding of the tragedy of outliving a loved one. But how many widows do you know who are widows because they murdered and ate their own husbands after sex? According to my Almanac of Statistics On The Frequency of Post-Coital Homicide, you know almost none. There are only two such widows living in the United States, and both of them are very famous. And you, reader, probably don't know anybody famous at all. You want a widow? Jackie Kennedy. You want a black widow? Coretta Scott King. Those are real widows. And neither of them ate their husbands. Actually, both of their husbands were assassinated, and I wouldn't be surprised if Black Widow spiders were involved.
Perhaps we ought to call it what it really is: a Nazi spider. Because like the Nazis, it tortures and kills its own kind. Like the Nazis, the females are larger and more frightening than the males, and they lay eggs. And like Nazism, it's one of the worst things in history, poisoning whoever it touches and permitted only in the complete absence of a just and loving God. And so what if it kills flies. Who cares? We all kill more flies in our sleep than spiders do in a year - a year which, for humans, is filled with beautiful human things like eating takeout and shopping for sheets, but for a spider is filled with terrible, disgusting, unacceptable spider things, like murdering and eating your sex partners.
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