Spider Bite Antidote

So, I once had a bracelet. Currently, I have no earthly idea what happened to it. It was, however, for a short while, my favorite accessory.

It was a cuff about a half an inch wide with pretty scroll work all over it. I thought it was the most beautiful bracelet in the world.

It only had one problem.

It was made of copper.

Now, for those of you uneducated in the ways of copper who are scratching your heads and thinking, “What does that have to do with anything? Copper’s pretty. Aren’t pennies made of copper?” – no.

Pennies are made of some random metal (See, I’ve done a lot of research on this.) and then coated in copper. It’s cheaper to make them that way, even though it costs significantly more than a penny to make a penny.

I know this because, about a year ago, Twin gave a speech on the uselessness of the penny, and I listened to it about 4683 times while she was perfecting it.

Anyway.

My bracelet.

Copper, when it comes in contact with skin for a prolonged period of time, turns skin a gorgeous greenish-teal color.

It really is a beautiful color.

If you have a beloved bracelet that you wear every single day of your life, the beautiful color will intensify until it turns extraordinarily dark and noticeable.

If you are young and vaguely foolish, you will actually enjoy this new pigmentation of your skin because you will be determined that it sets of the copper color of the bracelet quite nicely and gives it this wonderful sheen it never had before.

I was (some would say, “am”) young and vaguely foolish.

Of course, when you walk around with a wrist so dark green it looks like you are:

A. slowly turning into the Hulk,
B. hiding an alien inside your wrist,
C. very fond of green, leafy vegetables (actually, eating a large amount of those won’t turn you green. I’ve checked.),
D. carrying some kind of deadly mold on your wrist,
E. a carrier of some form of the plague,
or F. all of the above,

people feel inclined to ask questions.

That or they stare at your wrist and forget how to speak in normal sentences and pray that “that thing” never touches them.

At first, I would proudly hold up my wrist for a closer inspection and declare, “Copper turns skin green! Don’t you think the green sets off my bracelet so nicely?”

They would inevitably do one of three things:

1. sigh in relief and treat me like a slightly deranged but mostly harmless human being,
2. nod slowly and back away very quickly, never breaking eye contact until they were out of reach,
or 3. roll their eyes and tell me to take the bracelet off and please go wash my arm (this was mostly The Life-Givers).

I’ve always been a very dramatic child so these encounters always left me feeling discontent, like there was some great potential here that I was missing.

Then, one day, I was talking to a younger cousin I hadn’t seen in a while, and the question about my green arm inevitably came up.

I opened my mouth to give my usual answer when brilliance struck.

“I was bitten by a West African Flying Spider.”

His mouth dropped open in shock and awe, and he stammered out, “What’s that?”

I explained that it was a very rare, but extremely poisonous spider.

I told my young, naive cousin that I had been stalking one, trying to catch it, when it turned around and started chasing me!

He gasped and fell back. (It helped that he was deathly afraid of spiders.)

“I ran as fast as I could,” I said. “But those things are fast. I threw up my hands to try to swat it down, and it bit me, right here on the wrist, injecting its poison into my bloodstream.”

He was very nervous, his eyes flickering about the room. He asked me all kinds of questions about what it looked like and how it moved.

Being the wonderful, sweet person I am, I described a common wolf spider.

(The poor kid is still afraid of spiders, but he doesn’t remember that he has me to thank for that.)

Suddenly, his face cleared of all fear.

I knew the game was up, that he’d figured out I was making the whole thing up.

I prepared to laugh with him.

“Really?” he said. “I mean, I get that it bit you, but you’re still alive. It can’t be that bad.”

And so back into the story I went.

I explained that, luckily, I was close to a hospital.

I staggered to it, watching the green poison spread up my arm, knowing that, once the green reached my heart, I’d be dead.

He was close to tears.

I knew I needed to save myself quick so he wouldn’t have permanent damage.

So, I told him that, once again luckily, I fell into the doors of the ER right in time and a passing doctor happened to recognize my symptoms and have a copper bracelet in his pocket.

He slapped that puppy on my wrist, and immediately, the copper drained the poison back down my arm.

That bracelet filled with poison, and he quickly replaced it with another, smaller one. The one I was currently wearing.

Obviously, it wasn’t able to pull out all the poison, but it was maintaining it, keeping it all in this one spot.

His eyes were huge, so I added just for his benefit, “And if I ever take the bracelet off, the poison will spread even faster, and I’ll die.”

And then he dissolved into tears, and I felt like a horrible human being.

Nevertheless, this became the story I told absolutely everyone when they asked me about my wrist.

This was when I realized the power of storytelling.

To me, this was very obviously fake. I thought that everyone knew that copper turned skin green. I thought that everyone would be able to recognize the outrageous-ness of my story and know it was only a story.

It was only when people went to The Life-Givers, asking about my spider bite, or got worried when I finally took the bracelet off that I realized they had believed me.

Over the years, ever since then, I’ve told a lot of stories – each more outrageous than the last, each pushing the limits of what people believe, trying to see how far they’re willing to go.

Now, I’m more honest about it. Once I know they absolutely believe me, I’ll tell them I’m just joking or that it’s a story I made up.

Sometimes, they’re so wrapped up in this fiction I’ve created for them, though, they think the lie is when I tell them it’s all a lie.

People believe the most compelling truth, even when everything they know goes against it. People will trust what you tell them over what they can see, hear, and taste for themselves. If you put a tiny grain of truth in the most outrageous lie, they’ll cling to that grain and declare, “See? This has to be true!”

This is the power of words. This is the power of human trust. This is something that I’m learning to not use quite so flippantly.