Quarter Year

The fact that the woman working at the hotel came down in price without us even asking for it should have been a sign. We put down our stuff and I went in to wash my face and arms from the exhaust. I was greeted immediately by an inch long creature coming out of the drain. All 20 or his legs were kicking and I screamed. Mike didn’t respond, he just laid on the bed. There were other, less offensive creatures in there as well and I picked up the shower head and mercilessly washed them all down the drain. I showered, closed the bathroom door tightly and took a nap.

We didn’t spend much time looking around the room in the daylight. We hadn’t thought about it then because we were so tired. When we woke up, we went for a long ride and when we got back it was dark. I went to switch on the porch light, so I could get my key in the door. I unlocked it and went in. Mike waited to tell me that there was a spider outside, not one foot from there my hand had flipped the switch. “Where?” I asked. He pointed. “Oh my god!” The spider was literally the size of my hand. And it was fast. We spent the next ten minutes trying to get it away from the door, trying to scare it away, but not have it attack us. Mike went to look at another room. I thought about the spider jumping onto my face.

It wasn’t any better, so we decided to stay. There was only one light in the room. It was the one above the fan. The other bulbs had been taken out and since Bali has made an attempt to use only energy saving bulbs, it was harsh, almost neon. It was hot in the room, so turning off the fan was not an option and the light flicked all night with the fan. The room felt not unlike a prison cell.

The bed was up against the wall and there were burn marks from the outlet that stained the wall and the sheets next to the outlet. We pulled the bed away from the wall, cautious not to look too closely at what was behind it. We laid down on the bed, clothes on. The light flicked. Flick, flick, flick, flick, flick. I looked down at the floor. A few big ants were running around. I killed them with my shoe. I looked over at the dresser and noticed two spider nests clinging to the underside of a small ledge. “They probably won’t hatch tonight,” Mike said. I was not willing to take that chance, so I took a piece of paper and scraped one off. A mama spider jumped out and I yelped and jumped back. I killed her with my shoe and then made Mike do the other one. My nerves couldn’t handle it.

I laid back down and stared at the ceiling for a while before I watched the littler ants rush in to clean up the remains from where I had killed the bigger ants and knew there was nothing I could do. I zipped up our bag and rolled the sheets around me tightly. It was 80 degrees in the room, but full clothes it had to be.

The next morning, we had our free breakfast on the porch. Our door was open and I could see two more nests in the door jam, mama spiders nervously pacing back and forth in the transparent cocoons. Beneath the door was an ant nest. It was inside our room. “Did you see that?” I asked, pointing to the ants. “Mmmmhmmm,” he said.

“I hope they don’t expect that we’ll stay here,” I said.
“I think they got the picture when they heard all the screaming last night.”

Mike would later tell me that if I had asked to pack up and drive back in the middle of the night, he would have gladly done it. The bugs won.