Me and My Near-Death Experience

Yesterday, after my boyfriend, Max, and I went swimming, I almost died, and Max didn't care.

We live on a lake. It's this pocket of water beside a downtown with overpriced shops, an underwhelming resort, a park that is good to play in after dark, and tourist things like a boardwalk and large walking hill.

Our story begins on that hill.

Nuzzled safely between downtown and lakeside, this is the saddest little hill you ever did see. Carved with trails official and improvised, punctuated by trees and, toward the top of the hill, the occasional house, the only good this hill has ever served, for me, is a place to swim in the summer that is far removed from The Tourists. The Tourists never venture away from the main trail, down to the fringes of this hill, where rocks and sand give way to water, and you can find perfect little beaches and diving rocks.

One of our usual swimming places is a west-facing rock just large for two people to lie down on it beside each other. Nestled against a sheer rock face, the only way to get down to this slab is by following a spiral staircase of smaller boulders from the crest of the hill.

Max calls it the skinny dipping rock for reasons I trust you can infer; I call it the Beatles rock, because someone's gone and carved ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE on the wall behind it.

We were returning to the main trail from this rock, which involved Max giving me a lift up because I'm a little weak lady writer person, who is short and ginger and awkward. With his help, I scrambled up to higher ground, brushing a large spider web in the process.

You need to understand something, here: I am deathly afraid of spiders.

You can imagine my reaction when, with spider web clinging to my fingers and palm, I felt something crawling on my arm.

I swiped at the kamikaze insect, desperately, managed not to scream. and felt a sharp, staccato stab, like a fountain pen nib boring into the flesh of my ring finger.

I stared at my hand. An island of small, needly white floated in the angry pink sea of the rest of my finger.

"Max. Oh my god. Max."

"What? What's wrong?"

"A SPIDER BIT ME."

"Where? Let me see."

"Look, see, my finger, spider, bit, hurts."

Max studied my finger. "I think you're okay."

"It is TINGLING."

"Shh. You're going to be just fine. I don't think you got a spider bite."

"Yes I did." I tried to suck the spider venom out of my flesh. "I'm going to die. Or get rabies."

"If you got rabies, by the time you know it, it'll be at the point of being fatal. So, realistically, you're going to die either way."

"THERE IS TINGLING IN MY INDEX FINGER NOW."

Max held my injured hand in his to get me to stop worrying at it. "I was gushing blood earlier this week and didn't even complain this much." Max brightly and neatly changed the subject. "Hey, you know how they test for rabies?"

"No."

"They drill into your head and scrape away part of your brain."

I didn't say anything.

"Bzzzzzzzzzz," Max said, in his approximation of what a drill bit must sound like when burrowing into the human skull.

"I hope you know that, if I die, I'm going to be really upset at you."

"Bzzzzzzzzzzzz."

"I'm serious."

"Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz."

"There are puncture wounds, see?"

"I don't see any."

I held my hand closer to his face. "Right there."

"There's only one, Taylor."

"Then it was clearly a spider with one tooth. That's not the point."

Max reclaimed my hand, told me once again that I was fine, and we continued back to my car with a minimal amount of bitching and bzzzzzzing.

It was not until later that someone pointed out to me, intelligently, that I had probably been stung by a bee.