FLO-RITE

My dad kept a two-gallon pesticide sprayer in the basement. FLO-RITE, it said in raised letters across the handle. In the summer, he used to walk through the backyard, gently tapping the earth in intervals with the long, slender nozzle, dispensing chemicals. When he finished the yard, he walked inside our house and continued to spray, lining the baseboards with poison, wetting the carpet against the wall. Every year. Was it pesticide or insecticide? Now I’m not certain. It could have even been herbicide. Whatever it was, he believed it would keep the spiders away from our beds.

“Spiders?” I said. “What kind?”

“Slippery little black ones,” he said. I felt relief. I had been picturing something bigger and hairier.

“What’s wrong with slippery little black spiders? Do they bite?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head solemnly, “but when they gang up on you, it can be bad.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“I don’t think you would. You’re too young for that kind of reckoning.” His voice was pitched up a notch, like someone I’d never met. The chemical fumes must have been toying with certain important parts of his brain.

“Why do we kill them if they don’t bite?” I said.

But the conversation was over, he was putting the FLO-RITE away and whistling.

Later, at dinner, my mom produced a lump of pork from the oven. It was a pig when it had gone into the oven. When it came out it was pig-shaped pork. The oven had accomplished this. Our house was full of such awesome tools. The shower, for example. The bed. The central air and heat. All meant to speed along or induce change which would have occurred eventually in nature, but it might have taken months. Or longer. The pig would have died eventually and cooked in the sun. What would its death have meant then?

My mom called for my older brother to come to the table. He remained in the living room, playing Xbox at a terrifically high volume. It was one of those games in which you shoot an antique rifle into the soot-coated landscape of a foreign country. Our kitchen reverberated with gunfire and the mortal grunts of my brother’s enemies.

“Wait a second,” said my dad, “did you cook this in the oven? I sprayed in the oven.”

“No you didn’t,” said my mom.

“I did. I sprayed it up and down.”

We all three stared at our plates of pork.

“I’ve seen spiders in there,” he explained, his head laid sideways across the kitchen table, beside his plate. In the living room, my brother activated a rhythmic series of explosions, a sound which drew me away from the table, into the living room. On screen, I didn’t see any trace of war at all. My brother’s character stood on a beach, staring across an ocean. The sound came again when a wave crashed.