Spider facts!

  Category: Anatomy/Physiology

  Subcategory: Gastrointestinal function

  Spiders do not have teeth or a mouth in the traditional sense, but a sucking stomach with a pump action. Many species liquefy their diet using enzymatic processes outside of the body before sucking their prey dry. For those that ‘chew,’ there are fine comb-like hairs contained in the entry to the tract which allow for any spare debris to be swept away, preventing obstructions. This is followed by a second filtration further into the tract, along the rostral plate. Objects caught here are either further broken down and later absorbed, regurgitated, or lost during a subsequent molting phase.

  With his web complete, Jon moved into the tunnel. He stopped to think over his injuries. The first fight had left him with a few quills from the bunny landing on his back, and the slash on the front of his abdomen. They had been painful, but nothing he could not handle.

  The gash on at the front of his abdomen felt like a flesh wound. He thought of it as the kind that would be annoyingly sore the second and third day you had it, showing up every time you bent or moved. It wasn’t too bad today. Just a little burning.

  The quills were more like bee-stings. Burned like hell going in, but he had honestly forgotten about them after scraping them out with one of the claws on his first legs. He had managed it while prepping the dead bunnies.

  Then there was the new set of pains coming from his right cephalothorax, just above the legs and below where his eyes were situated. That was where that shit-bird of a cherub had whacked him. If that strike had hit his less armored abdomen, he thought it might have killed him, or at least crippled him enough to prevent his escape. That would have been functionally the same thing.

  Finally, there was the newest pain coming from just behind his eyes: since he sent out the second psychic pulse he felt like he had over-extended something. It was the mental equivalent to blowing a disc in your back.

  He recalled a time when he had bought a portable ac unit last year. He remembered looking at the box thinking ‘two man lift pshh, you don’t understand my power graphic designer man!’ Then moments later he was experiencing the humiliation of a middle-aged man’s spine, writhing on the ground. Whenever he felt for the mind-sense, it was a similar feeling to the white-hot coat hanger he had pictured in his low back that day.

  He felt confident the ability would return and the pain would fade soon, though he didn’t know why. He also knew that further use right now would mean extreme danger. That was what the pain was for, it was a warning.

  He was not quite sure what to do about all these injuries. He had read a few books on spiders years ago, and he had Zach’s spider facts available, but he did not feel confident in regular spider physiology, much less whatever magic version he had been turned into.

  He had often joked back on Earth that he was useless outside a hospital, and while it was not completely true, the reality was modern medicine was very limited without equipment or drugs.

  He could diagnose many problems for humans on exam alone, or at least give a very educated guess, but he would lack any kind of imaging or laboratory confirmation. The difficulty of performing any kind of treatment was even more pronounced when you did not have hands. He could probably set a broken bone in the wrist or ankle, or reduce a dislocated joint...well, someone else’s broken bone, as he supposed he didn’t really have those anymore. He doubted he had the dexterity for placing sutures, but if he found companions it would not be too challenging to walk someone else through that if he had to, at least for a simple interrupted approach.

  However, there was nothing he could do for his current injuries with the tools at hand.

  So he decided to focus on something else, his next meal. There were only two choices: bunny or bear. There was no means of preparing the food. He had no way to cook, and he had no spices or seasonings available.

  He chose bunny. It felt stupid, but he was momentarily at a loss for how exactly he was supposed to eat. Zach’s voice came to his rescue once more:

  Spider facts!

  Category: Behavior

  Subcategory: Feeding

  Larger spiders often have some means of ‘chewing’ their food. In some, specialized adaptations along the chelicerae allow for chewing. Others utilize the coxae, the closest of the limb segments along the pedipalps. In these spiders, the hip-like segment has powerful plating with serrated edges, allowing the spider to mash and saw their prey into workable fragments for ingestion. See the subsection on gastrointestinal function under anatomy for further detail.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Jon thought over the information. He supposed he was likely considered a ‘larger spider.’ He definitely didn’t see any way to use his fangs, the chelicerae, to chew. He used one palp to feel along the other, finding a powerfully plated ridge with saw-like teeth. It made him think of a meat tenderizer; this was probably how he was supposed to chew. He experimentally rubbed the ridges together. If you were to translate this action to human terms, it was like he had grinding teeth on his shoulders that he could mash together to break down prey.

  He tried not to think of the obvious jokes about having something called the ‘coxae’ so close to his mouth. He examined the bisected quill rabbit, then hesitantly grabbed it by the head and neck with his front legs. Jon lifted the torn end towards his mouth. It was the portion that was less covered in mud.

  A piece of his mind had been preoccupied since he had felled the bunnies, distracting him between the bouts of terror. Somewhere inside himself he felt resonance with the system message from earlier. The message had said to run, to hide, and to fight. But that was not what Jon kept turning to.

  It was one word at the end of the message: feast. He felt it like a yawning void within, the desire to gorge himself until he was full to bursting, and then to feed again. Gluttony in its purest form.

  As he began to tear into the remains, he saw a system window briefly flash into his vision. Jon immediately dismissed it with a thought. He continued ripping bits of flesh off, grinding them with his shoulder teeth into paste, and then devouring them.

  He knew he should be completely disgusted by this whole process. The texture should be terrible, the bits of bones, cartilage and remaining organs should disgust him. But Jon didn’t feel disgust. He felt like he was letting loose on a box of pastries after a rough day.

  He mashed more and more of the bunny into pulp, then opened his maw wide and shoved the mass in. As he swallowed, he felt comb-like structures in his mouth filtering out the remaining solid portions, and he let larger ones fall to the ground. It was like swishing mouthwash through your teeth, but with meat. The filtering mechanism removed the majority of the fur and remaining pieces of quill. Only the nearly liquefied parts made their way through.

  To summarize, the process was messy and objectively revolting. It was also the best god-damn meal he could remember ever having. He noisily mashed his former adversary to paste and sucked it down. As Jon ate, he drooled more and more onto the remains he was holding. His spit coated the bunny parts and he could see the digestive fluid visibly melting the flesh. The texture of the produced semi-liquid reminded him of a lentil soup he had made for his kids, pureed with ground turkey mixed into it for protein.

  As he finished off his first half-bunny, he turned to the remaining bunnies, barely pausing before grabbing the next closest one. It was the one missing most of its head after he bashed it with a rock, a thing which felt very far away somehow.

  Even in the near-trance state he found himself in, he realized there were some parts of the rabbits he did not want to eat.

  He cut the next bunny down the center, removing the intestines, and then carefully removing its gallbladder and liver. He had never been into hunting or butchering, but he recalled that if you cut open a gallbladder it ruined half the kill. He also primly cut off anything close to the bunny’s ass or privates, as there were some depths he was not hitting even now. He used his back claws to dig up some dirt in the back of the retreat, then dumped the refuse in the hole and scooted the dirt back on top.

  Everything else went through the same mashing and devouring cycle as the first bunny. Whatever made up his digestive enzymes was amazingly effective, and he did not see a single fragment of bone land after the first few bites. Some distant part of him was weirded out by this development, he knew spiders did not have magic-acid spit with digestive properties, but he supposed it was silly to question that among all the bizarre happenings of his new world. He processed this all absently, thoroughly lost in the euphoria of feeding for the first time. His whole body felt warm and comfortable, the pain of his wounds fading into the distant background.

  He recalled a time recently when he had gotten donuts for his wife and son. Hally had been too young to eat one. She had been sitting in her high-chair eating raspberries, making a mess and having a great time. Tommy had taken a bite of his donut, then started wiggling on the bench they sat on together. He kept chanting “Happy, happy, happy!” to himself over and over again between bites, dancing and bouncing the donut up and down in the air. Right now, Jon felt he truly understood that feeling of unhampered joy.

  He froze, fully processing his situation. Almost all of the fourth bunny was gone, and he found himself staring down at the bunny’s dead, accusing right eye. Only half of the head remained. There were scraps of fur, sizzling at his feet, but nothing more. He had scooped up the soup which had fell from the first bunny, guzzling it down in his reverie.

  He thought of his son, and how excited he had been to hold a rabbit at the petting zoo. His son, who loathed everything that creeped or crawled, especially spiders. He thought of Tommy witnessing a spider the size of a great dane ripping through the quilled bunnies.

  He dropped the head, feeling utter revulsion pulse through himself in waves. He desperately wanted to retch, but lacked the capacity. He slowly backed away to the wall of the cave. He wanted to sob, to cry for the first time in years. His whole life, gone in an instant. No tears came. With no lacrimal ducts, they were not something he could produce. With no vocal cords, there were no sobs.

  He despaired for several minutes, his thoughts racing and the utter internal rejection worsening. A horrible feeling of unreality came over him, his world spinning, vision graying. What would even happen, if he did find a way back? He would go knock on the door, scratch out a message in the dirt? “Hi honey I’m home, oh by the way I am now a giant spider. Does in sickness and in health cover this situation or do we need to add in a rider?”

  Then he felt a tiny tremor through the ground. It could not have been more than one or two meters away. He whipped his gaze down and around the area he felt it originating from. It was not in the web, it was inside his retreat, past all his protective measures. The movement stilled as he tried to find the source, his heart pounding away at the top of his abdomen.