Spiders built temporary shelters and nested in our home as the Igbo people believe they do when people mourn, but they took their invasion a step further and invaded our mother’s mind. Mother was the first to notice the spiders and the bulging orbs clipped by thread-like fangs to the roof; but that was not all. She began seeing Ikenna spying on us from the carapace of the spiders hanging in the orbs, or saw his eyes looking through the spirals. She complained about them: Ndi ajo ife—These beastly, scaly, terrifying creature. They scared her. They made her weep, pointing at the spiders, until Father—in a bid to soothe her, and having been mightily pressed by Mama Bose, a pharmacist, and Iya Iyabo to harken to the voice of a grieving woman no matter how absurd he might consider her request—dislodged every webbed abode in the house and smashed several spiders dead against the walls. Then, he also drove out wall geckos, and drew battle lines against cockroaches, whose proliferation was fast becoming a menace. Only then was peace restored; but it was a peace with swollen feet and a limp in its gait.
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