Avenge of the Arachnids

     Danny was a normal nine year-old boy…well, sort of.  He enjoyed running and playing just like other kids his age.  He had a neat baseball card collection, a cool bike he’d learned to do tricks with, and his favorite movie was Star Wars.  Like lots of boys his age, Danny loved bugs. In fact, he had a fascination with them—a deep, dark, murderous fascination.
 While his friends would be playing tag or capture the flag, Danny would be hunting for bugs.  He would search for cicadas clinging to the trees and rip off their fragile wings. He’d find slugs inching slowly across the sidewalk, pour salt on them, and watch them shrivel up into a dried corpse.  He even enjoyed ripping the heads off of cockroaches just to see if they would still live without them.  To Danny, it was all fun and games.  Besides, who hasn’t taken the bottom of a shoe to a scurrying bug once or twice? 
The other kids in the neighborhood didn’t think too much of it at first.  But Danny’s games quickly grew into an obsession that alienated him from his friends.  Even his best friend, Tom, told him he that he didn’t want to play with him anymore if all he was going to do was torture bugs, and when that happened Danny was left all alone.  “What’s the big deal?  They’re just gross, disgusting bugs.  It’s not like anyone likes them anyway,” Danny said to himself as he stomped on a freshly built anthill.
It was another typical weekday afternoon and Danny was outside looking for his next insect to decimate when he heard his mother call for him.
“Danny, time for dinner!”
He sighed and yelled, “Be there in a second!” 
Then he looked down at the spider, already hurt from Danny’s “play,” and said,
“I don’t think you really need all of those,” and tore off half of its legs, one, by one, by one, by one.  He then left the spider on the sidewalk to die and proceeded to go inside for dinner.
As he entered the kitchen, he saw his mom stirring something on the stove.
“What are you making?” he asked her.
“Chicken and rice,” she said.
“Oh, yum! I love chicken and rice.  You didn’t put peas in it this time, did you?”  Danny hated peas.
“No peas,” his mom replied.
“Good,” Danny said.
He was just about to upstairs to his room when his mom turned around.  He noticed something crawling on her face.  As he got closer, he saw it was a huge, fine bull ant pinching at her forehead.  He wondered how she could not notice it!
“Mom, there’s a giant ant crawling on your face,” Danny shouted.
“What?” she asked.
“Just don’t move,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
Danny went to the dinner table to get a napkin so he could grab the bug without it pinching him, but when he came back, it was gone.
“Did you get it?” he asked his mom.
“Get what?”
“The ant!” Danny sounded exasperated.
“Honey, I don’t know what you are talking about.  I didn’t see or feel anything,” his mom said.  Danny thought it must have fallen off and crawled away.  It was definitely there a minute ago.  
“Why don’t you sit down and eat, dear.  You’re food is ready.”
Danny pulled the chair out from the table and sat down.  The ant must have been long gone by now and he was really hungry anyway.  His mom put a big plate of chicken and rice—with no peas—in front of Danny.  Just as he was about to pick up his fork, he saw something moving on his plate. It was his rice! It was alive, only it wasn’t rice at all.  He was sitting in front of a plate full of maggots! Fat and sickly yellow, they gave off a musty smell, like rotting wood. He screamed and his mom sprinted towards him.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“The rice! It-, it’s moving, like maggots!” he said with a gasp.
Danny’s mom looked at the plate of food and then back at him.  She stared at Danny with a puzzled look on her face and said, “Why don’t you go to bed dear.  You don’t look well.”
Danny nodded and happily went to his room.  He jumped into his bed and repeated the scene over and over.  He couldn’t believe it, but he was sure he saw the maggots and the huge ant on his mom’s head.  But the scariest part was when he took a second look at his plate, the maggots were gone.  It was just rice.
Danny finally concluded that he must have just imagined everything.  However, he couldn’t shake that smell, that horrid, musty smell.  It was still in his nose.
Danny eventually fell asleep, but woke up to an awful itch.  It was almost intolerable.  He immediately went to scratch it and noticed a large black bump on his arm.  The bump looked mean and ugly, and it throbbed and ached terribly. The pain was getting worse. It was becoming unbearable.  Just as he thought he would faint, the pain stopped.  Suddenly, the skin over the bump broke open.  Dozens of small black spiders crawled out of his arm!  Danny was too scared to scream.  They crawled everywhere, on his floor, into the outlets, up the walls and all over his bed.  But that’s not what scared him.  It wasn’t their crawl, their number, or even that they came out of his arm.  What absolutely terrified him was that they all had only four legs and they all stared at him with their black eyes.  Dark, soulless eyes that wanted retribution.  As they moved closer, those eyes got bigger and bigger.  And as swarms of spiders began crawling up his arms and legs, Danny could have sworn he heard a voice say, “I don’t think you really need all of those.”  Danny found his voice again…and screamed.