Excuse me while I run and dab myself with Holy Water before I return to my room and to my cross. It seems rather dreary my mind having to come grips with a really aberrant American secret religious cult culture. People are afraid to say such things, things might
happen to them I need to distract myself and I think I will tell you kind readers the story of Christine. You don't mind reading it, do you? It's really rather entertaining and I've titled it The Open Room.
“Ah, there's another one!”
“Another what?”
“Another spider!”
“You've got spiders on your mind, Christine!”
“Oh, yeah, well it just crawled under the chair cover.”
Christine's mother got up from her easy chair and went over to where Christine had been sitting. She pulled the covers up, but there was nothing there.
“It must have hid in some corner.” Christine said, insisting that it wasn't just her imagination.
Christine was now sitting on the couch with her arm resting over the edge. “yikes!” she screamed again, “something just touched my arm!”
“Listen, kid,” her younger sister was obviously irritated by her screams; “I want to see this movie, not hear your screams about spiders.”
“Oh, shut up Mary.” Christine was in no mood to be told to stop screaming by her younger sister. But she did concede to herself that the second spider could have been one of the tassel fringes on the couch cover.
“I think I'll go to sleep. This show's dull and anyway.”
When Christine got out of the room, her mother said to her sister, “She's had spiders on her mind every day since school's been out. She said that she had a few of them visit her quite often during the last couple of weeks. It must have been the heat that brought them out, he he.”
Christine had gone to her room and shut the door behind her. She began to leisurely pull her clothes off. When she came to her little brief top, she had to remove her glasses in order to pull it off. It made her very uncomfortable to remove her glasses unless, of course, she was in bed. In a very short time she was in a short bed shirt and she jumped quickly under her bed covers. Before she could take her glasses off and place them on the night stand, she remembered the light. “Oh, hell!” she growled as she got out of bed and flipped the switch. With her glasses off and the light turned off, she could see nothing. She made a quick leap for her bed. Although it was a hot night, she pulled her covers up around her neck and felt safe enough to close her eyes.
“Don't look now, but you got yourself a spider crawling up your wall, Miss Howard.” Christine Howard looked up and there were two spiders marching up her wall.
“What do you expect down here in this dungeon?” Christine answered April, one of her brighter students.
“Why'd they got you teaching down here?” April was a very persistent young girl.
“What can we expect with a Board of Education like ours? I wasn't always down here. I had a room up on the second floor for two years. It was so clean and airy. This place is positively foul!” Miss Howard had a way of being open with her students. It didn't even dawn on her not to degrade the board of education in their presence. Besides during the last two weeks of school she had very few show up for class and her guard was completely down especially in the face of those damnable spiders!
“You better move your foot cause there's a big black bug comin straight for it” Diane another one of her students said which made Christine jump up and look, sure enough there it was. She picked up her waste basket and placed it gingerly over the bug accompanied by the jeering laughter from the five students in her room.
“I should have known you were afraid of bugs before,” John spoke up and he had a mischievous look in his eyes.
“Where were you planning on getting them from your home?” Christine had learned not to let anything get by when you're working with tenth graders.
“No, yours!” John had also learned not to let a teacher get away with a crack like that.
Suddenly Dennis, one of her drop-outs pulled the door open and practically bounced in. “Hey, Miz Howard, could I use your waste basket?”
“Why?”
“Hey, I got to clean up my locker.”
“Sorry, but I've got a bug buried under it.”
“Is that all?” Without a second thought, he picked up the basket and put his foot securely over the bug. It made such a crunch that Christine nearly passed out.
