The father was driving his car down Punt Road in the early hours of Sunday morning. There was traffic but it wasn’t especially busy as they headed south. His driving, this son noticed, had gone from it’s usual bad level to really bad. It wasn’t at worse yet; this would mean actually being off the road or wrapped around a tree, and they were not there quite yet.
The cause of this astonishing driving, the son realised, was a spider on the windscreen. A black, nasty-looking spider, right there only a foot from his father’s intense, furrowed face. His face, every molecule of his attention was fixed on the spider. With a sharp flick of his wrist, he squirted water up onto the glass, then flicked the wipers to high. Swish-swack, swish-swack went the wipers across the glass. It should have caught the spider squarely and thrown it off the car and away onto the road. The spider was having none of this. It ducked down off the glass and under the hood.
“I hate spiders, too,” groaned the son, “but it’s not like it’s coming in here to get us.”
Just then, the spider reappeared. It clambered back onto the bonnet and started off for the front of the car.
“It’s going into the engine,” the father said through gritted teeth, as he pulled the car over to the side of the road. He got out just as the spider reached the end of the bonnet and went down into the grill. The father took his shoe off as he strode to the front of the car, hand raising his shoe in the air. He posture said it all: this spider would not live to frighten him another day.
The son looked as he sat in the passenger seat, amazed by the intensity of his father’s expression as he started at the grill. The look itself was so hard that it might very well kill the spider if it ever emerged.
The son found his hand moving over the handbrake, over the steering wheel and found it hovering over the black plastic button that would make the car horn roar. He looked at his palm above the button, then at his father’s intense expression and he closed his face in closer to the grill. He looked back and forth, back and forth, and his touch was ever closer to the button.
In this very moment, he flashed forward to his father’s funeral. Someone is saying, “so how did he die?”
“He saw a spider when he was driving,” the son pictured himself lying, bare-faced, “and the shock quite literally gave him a heart-attack.”
The horn remained silent and the father returned to his car, quite alive. In the passenger seat, he found his son roaring with laughter and holding his sides with laughter at the potentially fatal practical joke that he hadn’t quite played.