When my nephew told me that his favorite superhero was Spider-Man I thought, “Well, I better start leaving food out on my lawn for Spider-Man, then.” After all, Spider-Man flies around the city all day solving mysteries and picking up garbage. He probably gets hungry and he probably thinks, “It would be nice if I could find a home-cooked dinner on the ground.” Plus my nephew would be so happy if he knew that he had an aunt who fed Spider-Man. He’d probably get one of those “My Aunt Feeds Spider-Man” banners to hang over his bed. So I started cooking food for Spider-Man and leaving it out on my lawn for him to eat. I left five home-cooked meals out for Spider-Man, and ultimately I found it a stressful experience. Here are the five meals:
1. Pancakes
One morning I got up at 5 a.m. and made a batch of pancakes for Spider-Man. Then I walked onto my front lawn and left the pancakes on the ground for him. I didn’t give him a plate because I needed all my plates inside, but I used some sidewalk chalk to draw a protective circle around the pancakes so that nobody else would take them. About six hours later, Spider-Man swung down out of the sky, rolled his mask up over his nose, grabbed the pancakes with his hands and stuffed them into his mouth.
I walked up to him and said, “Spider-Man, I hope you liked the pancakes,” but I guess I must have startled him because he screamed and blasted me with a continuous spray of web out of his wrists for about 40 straight seconds that left me totally cocooned in a huge ball of sticky fabric. Spider-Man said, “I’m sorry, I thought you were Doctor Octopus sneaking up on me.” I said, “I’m not Doctor Octopus. My name is Meghan and I really need you to help me out of these webs,” but I guess I was buried too deep in the web ball for Spider-Man to hear me because instead of helping me, he just said, “I’m so afraid of Doctor Octopus,” and then I heard him shooting his webs and flying away. I remained cocooned in Spider-Man’s web ball until it got dark and then my neighbor finally saw me and called the fire department to cut me out of the web ball with the jaws of life.
2. Grilled Cheese
A few days later, I cooked Spider-Man a grilled cheese sandwich and left it on the ground in front of my house. About eight hours went by and the sun was starting to go down and the sandwich had attracted ants, so I picked it up and was bringing it back inside when Spider-Man swung down out of the sky on a web and grabbed the grilled cheese out of my hands. Spider-Man said, “Spider Rule Number One: Never throw away a good sandwich.” I said, “It’s not perfectly good, there are ants all over it.” And Spider-Man saw the ants and screamed and threw the sandwich about 600 yards with his super strength. Then Spider-Man said, “I didn’t scream because I was scared. I screamed because I was angry. Angry at Doctor Octopus. For what he did to all those innocent people.” Then Spider-Man reached into the shopping bag he had hanging from his belt and pulled out a bear trap. He said, “I’m going to set this in your yard just in case Doctor Octopus comes by here.” He set the bear trap on my lawn, right near the sidewalk. It had huge metal spikes. I said, “That looks dangerous,” and Spider-Man said, “You can’t kill Doctor Octopus with anything safe.” Then he shot his webs onto a passing bus and let the bus drag him face-down across my lawn and down the street at 45 miles per hour.
3. Spaghetti And Meatballs
The next day I cooked up a plate of spaghetti and meatballs and left it on the ground outside of my house for Spider-Man. The entire day went by and he didn’t come by to eat it. I decided not to throw it away since he got mad at me last time with the grilled cheese sandwich, so I just left it out and forgot about it. At around 2:30 a.m. I woke up to the sound of screaming coming from my front lawn. I went outside and saw a man with his leg caught in the bear trap. He was wearing a lab coat, he had a stethoscope around his neck, and he had an octopus for a head. Spider-Man was standing next to him, watching the man scream while he calmly ate the spaghetti and meatballs I had left on the ground for him. I said, “It looks like you were right, your trap caught Doctor Octopus.” Spider-Man said, “This isn’t Doctor Octopus. I don’t know who this is. We should call him an ambulance.”
I called an ambulance and the paramedics loaded the octopus doctor into the back on a stretcher. Before they drove away, the ambulance driver stuck his head out the window and called me over. He leaned out the window towards me and said, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but we’re not going to help this creature. We’re going to do experiments on him and then dissect him to find out how his crazy body is possible.” Then he drove away with the ambulance sirens blaring, and I don’t know where they were going, but it was in the opposite direction of the hospital. After the sound of the sirens had faded, Spider-Man said to me, “I need to find a cave where I can hide from Doctor Octopus for the rest of the night. Tomorrow please cook me a microwaved apple.” Then he shot his web into the sky and flew away.
4. Microwaved Apple
The next day I put an apple in the microwave for one minute and left it on the ground outside my house. Spider-Man was waiting on my roof and he jumped down immediately and started eating the apple. Spider-Man said, “The apple is not hot enough. Next time, microwave it for longer.” I raised my eyebrows and said, “How about ‘thank you?’” And Spider-Man said, “You’re welcome.” Then Spider-Man put the apple on the ground, pointed his wrists at it, and started shooting mustard and ketchup out of his wrists where the webs usually came out. I said, “I didn’t know you could shoot ketchup and mustard,” and Spider-Man said, “I got bit by a new type of spider.” After spraying the apple with ketchup and mustard for a very long time, Spider-Man picked up the apple and took a bite. He said, “It’s bland because it hasn’t been microwaved long enough. It needs more ketchup and mustard.” He put the apple back on the ground and started spraying it with ketchup and mustard from his wrists again. He sprayed it for a very, very long time. Spider-Man started to shrivel and wilt like a deflating balloon, but still he kept spraying the ketchup and mustard out of his wrists. It was clearly sucking the life out of him, so I said, “I think that’s enough ketchup and mustard,” and Spider-Man said, “You can’t tell me what to do, my uncle died,” and just kept going and going. At this point, Spider-Man’s costume was hanging loosely over his withered body like a blanket draped over a dead tree. Yet he continued to spray ketchup and mustard out of his wrists.
By the time the ambulance arrived, Spider-Man was lying face down on the ground, weakly shooting jets of ketchup and mustard into the air at nothing in particular. The ambulance driver was the same one from the night before and as the paramedics were loading Spider-Man into the back on a stretcher, he took me aside and said, “We found this inside the skull of the octopus man, where the brain should have been.” And the ambulance driver held up a pearl the size of an orange and when I looked into it I saw the reflection of myself as an old woman.
5. Hotter Microwaved Apple
After Spider-Man almost died in my yard, I stopped leaving food out for him for a while. I had found the whole process of cooking for Spider-Man pretty stressful and didn’t think it seemed worth it any more. My nephew was pretty mad at me when he found out I had stopped feeding Spider-Man. He said Spider-Man was hungry and that it was all my fault. He said that without my food, Spider-Man didn’t have enough energy to fight Doctor Octopus and so now Doctor Octopus was running rampant through the city knocking over garbage cans, tearing people apart with his giant mechanical arms, and stealing silverware from restaurants. This made me feel pretty guilty, so one day I microwaved an apple for 15 minutes and left it on the ground in front of my house.
For most of the day the apple just sat there. Then a limousine pulled up in front of my house. The windows were tinted, so I couldn’t see who was inside. One of the windows at the back of the limo rolled down about halfway, and from somewhere inside a web shot out, stuck to the apple, and pulled it back inside the limo. The window rolled up and the limo drove away. That was the last time I left food out for Spider-Man. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you really need to impress your nephew for some reason.
