twitchy by character

The verses were written in tiny glass beads so they showed up well at night. We ordered these from the Grace and Truth Scripture Depot in Erie, Pennsylvania, and the favourites were "The wages of sin is death, Rom. 6:23" and "I am the way, the truth and the life, Jn. 10:6." The verse from John was made of white beads, the Romans from lurid red, and if your car came up behind a Brethren car on the road at night, that rear verse jumped right at you. It certainly jumped out at me the night I drove Karen Mueller back from Avon, where we had had two whiskey sours apiece on her fake ID.
Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon Days

The worst part about a camel spider is that you don’t have the foggiest idea what it is when you see it in the flesh. It was too long to be a spider and didn’t have the sting of a scorpion, although it looked like a cross between the two. It was the colour of the sand and – I swear to you – about as long as my hand, with extremely aggressive tentacles or mandibles jutting out of its head. It didn’t look like it did cute things like eat the dung left in the sand by camels, or sip on early morning dew. And this one was very nervous. Perhaps it was my shadow in the harsh glare. Or maybe it was just twitchy by character.

When it moved – and it was trying repeatedly to climb up the pavement – it did so with such speed you weren’t sure if you could outrun it if it came at you, and you hoped it didn’t jump. Later, checking it out on the Internet, I learnt that it probably could have run half as fast as the fastest human. That’s about thrice as fast as I can manage. Thankfully, it turns out camel spiders aren’t as bad as they look, and won’t bite unless attacked. They aren’t venomous, and the most you’ll suffer is an ugly wound from their very large mouth.

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