Fuel cap tether proves a precarious tightrope
Chris Lux Hayes stops mowing and goes about refueling his John Deere X384 garden tractor. He unscrews the gas cap and notices an exceptionally tiny spider balancing on the cap’s black tether.
The spider, which has a translucent green body no bigger than a mung bean, clambers the wrong way on the tether, heading for the filler-pipe opening of the fuel tank.
Those gas fumes will surely damage this little dude, Hayes concludes worriedly.
The spider stops advancing to stand, wiggling its front legs, at a spot where the tether extends beyond the opening’s rim to present a grisly precipice. Something strange in the spider’s behavior suggests it’s already feeling disoriented.
Hayes tries to lure the spider onto the index finger of his gloved hand, but the spider rebuffs the offer, wobbling and teetering, giving the author a good fright.
Maybe I should try nudging the gas cap in a manner that shifts the tether and sneaks the spider away from the opening, Hayes considers. Then the little dude can spring to safety—and I can get back to mowing my lawn.
With extreme care, Hayes pokes at the cap, sending the faintest of tremors along the tether. The spider instantly loses its footing and drops into the gas tank.
“Fuck,” Hayes mutters, feeling quite crummy. He glances around his yard as if searching for something or someone and then resumes refueling his garden tractor.
Remembering one Great Flying Wallenda of a spider
The author tracked down the identity of the translucent green spider, first ruling out the magnolia green jumping spider (Lyssomanes viridis) because Minnesota is well outside that spider’s range.
He eventually settled on the American green crab spider (Misumessus oblongus), which fits the bill range-wise, size-wise, and green translucency-wise.
Although, he wasn’t a natural skywalking, highwire actor, our tiny green spider was a brave little bub. He is justly memorialized in this humble post.¹
During his research, the author discovered that scores of photos of spiders in Minnesota remain unidentified by professional and lay arachnologists. People rarely encounter such disturbing news without developing some form PHHD (Post Harrowing Horror Disorder).
Don’t laugh. Would you accuse Chicken Little of being a chicken-hearted chicken if the sky started raining poisonous alien spiders? The author certainly wouldn’t.
Who is Grusha Blaga?
Meanwhile, back in the first stage of the novel, Chaya, we are introduced to Grusha Blaga, a Transylvanian witch girl/research scientist held captive by Brink Veyron, the archenemy of Mars Lahar, the warfighting hero of The Endarkened Series.
One of the first things we learn about Grusha is the scope of her intellect. She is evidently gifted with omniscience, a topic hotly debated by the world’s religions over the centuries. Most theological experts in this area certify omniscience as one of many attributes of perfection owned and operated by their cherished version of a single supreme God.
Grusha would be the first to say omniscience is nothing more than a construct with as much value to God as a monkey wrench is to a chipmunk.
Excerpt from CHAYA
The witch was in the guest bedroom, her home since a team of CIA minders had delivered her to the Headstone building, a sixty-story oddity of black glass in downtown Dirtfield, the ninth largest city in Minnesota and the new Asgard for private security and paramilitary firms. Mr. Sticks thought about the witch, aka Grusha Blaga, aka the girl who knows everything.
She was beautiful. Mr. Sticks had to give her that, although it didn’t cost him much because he placed limited value on looks in general. Veyron said she was a full-blood Gypsy, or properly Romani, from Transylvania, but that meant little to Mr. Sticks because his own ethnicity was up for grabs.
Veyron said she was a research cosmogonist, the best and brightest on Earth. Apparently, she studied the origins of reality and came up with spectacular theories about the universe and its contents. What good was that? Apparently, even mediocre ETs could pimp out all 400 billion stars in the Milky Way.
According to Veyron, squads of cognitive psychologists had analyzed the witch during her formative years and had muscled their way to various controversial conclusions. More than a few crept out on a limb and insisted her mind possessed inherent omniscience, meaning she could know anything she wished to know. So much for the great unknown. If it was knowable, Grusha Blaga knew how to know it.
That’s something, Mr. Sticks had to admit. He could get behind that kind of talent if he could figure out the thinking formulas of a literal know-it-all. But the scope of the witch’s mind always entered and exited his own thoughts as an unnerving blur.
Different story for a cadre of shadow-faced functionaries in the U.S. intelligence services. They recognized a game-changing potency in Grusha Blaga’s intellect. They labeled the witch critical infrastructure on par with the hydropower system or communications sector, only in secret so nobody outside a select circle knew what was happening.
Bonus omniscience gallery
Escape to the Bughouse contacted 15 artists in a number of genres, including abstract, landscape, fantasy, and horror, requesting works of art based on this concept: “Magnificent fine art masterpiece closeup portrait oil painting of omniscience.”
Here are the results:
The functionaries didn’t suspect Grusha was a witch, of course, but they did know she couldn’t be allowed to wander off or die or fall into the clutches of nefarious foreign powers. Veyron had used that pry bar to finesse the CIA into grabbing Grusha and handing her over to Headstone for safekeeping.
Talk about nefarious foreign powers, Mr. Sticks thought with marginal amusement.
“Listen to this, Sticks,” Christian called. “They categorize alien civilizations by type. Type One controls typhoons and volcanoes at the planetary level. Type Five manages the energy of one whole universe. Type Seven is God. He manufactures universes from scratch and then messes with them. Fuck that guy. Humans are Type Zero. They can’t do squat. They don’t say what we are.”
What’s that make the witch? Mr. Sticks wondered.
Check out NOVELS on the author’s website…🍺
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¹ The author determined posthumously the translucent green spider was a dude and/or bub.
Bonus spidery PHHD gallery
