Attack of the Centipedes! (Part Two)

We were cuddled up in bed.  I was nearly asleep, the day's events slipping into memory, and my arms wrapped lovingly around my husband.  Then he spoke.

"Honey?  Can I tell you something you don't want to hear?"

Honestly, who wakes their wife up to say something like that?  I was suddenly fully awake, preparing to hear about an outlandishly expensive car he wanted to buy or a job that would require us moving to Idaho.  "What, baby?"

"...when I was downstairs today..."

Only two things happen in the basement: laundry gets done, and centipides roam freely like wild mustangs on the plains of the American midwest.  Vaguely, I hoped he was going to tell me a story about how he shrunk his new Gap khakis.

"I was cleaning the drain...and one of them came up out of it."

I shuddered.

"So I hurried upstairs to get a shoe to smash it with, and I figured it would have been gone by the time I came back."

I shuddered again.

"Um, but it was still there.  It just kept running around in a little circle.  It wasn't trying to hide or anything.  Just running around in a circle.  So I killed it."

I relaxed.

"And then, another one came up out of the drain."

I shuddered again.  This had the makings of a horror movie, but I didn't want it to be happening in my house.

"It was a teeny one, just a baby.  I guess he was looking for big brother.  So I killed it."

"...oh..."

"And then, Momma came up, looking for her kids.  So I killed her, too.  Three of them  I killed them all.  Do you want me to clean the drain again tomorrow and see if I can get any more?"

"No, it's ok."  Good God, Ross, it's not like they're ten-point bucks.  You don't get a point for every freaking leg you smash!

He paused for a second.  "It was strange.  That first one was weird.  I mean, they're supposed to like the dark.  They always run and hide when we turn on the lights, right?"

Was I really discussing insect duck-and-cover tecniques with my husband at midnight?  "I guess so.  The ones we've seen usually do."

"This one was messed up, I think.  He just kept running in that circle, like he was panicking."

"Maybe he was hatched with half his legs shorter than the other half.  Maybe that's how he always moved."

Oddly, the thought of a centipede with a birth defect struck us as so ridiculously hysterical that my anxiety disappeared, and I didn't have nightmares about giant bugs that evening.

Last night, around eleven, I went downstairs to get a glass of water from the kitchen.  I flicked on the light and there was one of those monsters, sitting just to the left of the table.  Despite my grogginess, I took exactly one-millionth of a second to identify it.  I don't know that I've ever screamed so loud in my life.  While I was screaming, I was actually consciously wondering why Ross had not flown to my side, shoe in hand, ready to strike down the offending beast.  During the breath I took between screams, I heard him call, "Honey, what's wrong?" but I kept screaming.  Then, as he came downstairs, I burst into tears and I blubbered, "I saw one, I saw one!"  I ran out of the kitchen and hid on the stairwell.  "Honey, take a deep breath," he soothed, "I'll get it."

After a few minutes, I didn't hear the tell-tale thwack of his sandal on the linoleum, so I put on my shoes and tiptoed into the kitchen.  "Where is it?" I whimpered, forcing myself to grab his flashlight and illuminate the dark, crumb-infested corners of the room.  "I can't find it," he said, at the moment my beam of light hit the motionless bug.  "It's another one," I gasped.  Surely that small, quivering thing wasn't the leviathan that had just startled me.  Was it?

"It's the same one," I admitted lamely.  "It's kind of little, I guess."

We yanked the kitchen table out of the way and crept towards it.  It remained perfectly still.  I was surprised.  Those things are super-attuned to vibrations, and, like most "feeler bugs", skitter out of the way when they sense an approach.  But this one was...playing dead?

Ross and I looked at each other and prepared to lunge when the thing make a break for it.  But it never moved.  Finally, frustrated, I shoved the chair it was hiding under.  It twitched lightly, and ambled over to a crumb that was lying near the radiator.  It ambled.  Have you ever seen anything with more than eight legs amble?  It did.  It was as casual as though it were mingling at a cocktail party.

"Is it...eating a Cheerio?" Ross asked.

"Yeah, you eat that.  It's good for your heart, you little freak," I narrated like a crook in a crummy crime novel.  Ross dealt the maiming blow with his shoe, and removed two sets of the centipede's legs.  I smashed the flailing half and I do not lie when I say that I could actually feel it under my flip flop.

There was a moment of silence.

"Did it try to eat the Cheerio?" Ross repeated.

"It's time for bed, honey."

During our study of centipedes in their "natural" habitat, we've learned the following things:

    1. They can survive an eight-foot fall with nothing more than mild disorientation.

    2. Like other wild animals, they are capable of being protective of their young, but their young are idiots.

    3. They can be demobilized by petrified female screams.

    4. Following the current health-food trend, they are making wiser choices involving low-sugar, high-fiber cereals.

I guess we'll arm ourselves with heavy boots and Cheerios from here on out.