As a child, my mother often hid Easter Eggs around the house for me to find. She did this all the time, not just on Easter. It was a fun game until the day I invited my friend Mary over to play. We searched for a while before finding a big clump in back of the basement and when we found them she screamed, "What are those!"

"Easter Eggs," I said, plucking one from the nest.

"Easter Eggs are supposed to be shiny and filled with chocolate," she said, "these are all sticky and gross."

Well, I wasn't going to stand for her insulting my mother's eggs, so I made her go home. I thought that would be the end of it, but a few days later a group of military men and scientists came to the house and took my mother away.

"Son," one of them said, "I don't know how to tell you this, but your mother was not actually your mother, but an eight-foot spider."

"That's not true!" I shouted at first, but then things started to make sense, like how she slept in the top corner of the master bedroom or how she knitted all my clothes out of "yarn" that squirted out her abdomen.

Even if she had lied to me, it was hard to watch her dragged away in a giant cage by those men. She was the only mother I'd ever known. I'd always thought she had the most beautiful, slender legs and the most graceful mandibles. My eyes started to water as the van pulled away and I ran inside to my father.

"There, there" he said, beginning to cry himself, and wrapped me in his leathery wings.