And they take SO MUCH killing. You don't smack a centipede with a shoe and call it good. Oh no.
You smack it four or five times in the front end, then another two or three in the back, then again in the front. All along one end or the other keeps writhing and aiming its stingers at you.
We tried spraying one with poison. It charged us, so to speak, and kept coming as we backed up spraying furiously. Took about eight feet before the son of a bitch was dead.
So this is what this story is about. Two nights ago I went out to lock the gate before going to bed. As I came back in, I closed the front door and turned to lock it, and peripherally noticed something moving at my feet. Somehow, as I opened and closed the door, a centipede had tried to come inside and I had closed the door on it.
And it was writhing and struggling and trying to pull itself in. So I grabbed a shoe and smacked it in the head three time. It finally quieted down. I decided to wait until morning to deal with it. But Tori had heard the slam-slam-slam, so she knew it was a centipede. Nothing else requires that much killing.
The next morning I grabbed the broom, opened the door and had to stifle a scream. Because the back end of the son of a bitch was still wriggling. In fact, once I cleared it from the door, it started coming forward again. This was 11 hours later! The front half was ruined, it was bent in half at the middle, and it was still trying to get into the house! I took a picture, then dispatched him for good and all.
In the picture below, the top portion is the half that I smacked repeatedly with a shoe. It's relatively flat. The bottom half kept pushing the front end forward, waving those stingers and behaving horribly.
Life in the tropics – It's not all rum and mangoes and beautiful beaches. Sometimes it's monsters from hell. But I can imagine a REALLY cheesy SyFy movie featuring these things.
4 comments:
Ew.
Our first visit to St. Croix is probably the most expensive vacation we've ever taken. My husband was stung/bitten/viciously attacked by a centipede that was made up into our bed. He had a pretty violent allergic reaction requiring a trip to the emergency room. Our health insurance didn't cover that. During the same trip I got tossed by a wave and barely nicked my leg on some coral and landed on a sea urchin. I actually have had to have two in-office surgeries to get the coral spot to finally heal five years later. It's not like it's stopped us from visiting, but I'm super vigilant about bug spray because I figure Dengue Fever is next.
Dengue is no fun. Tori had it last year. A bad week. But when the week was over she realized she hadn't had a cigarette in that time so she quit smoking, which means I did as well. So that's something. But it's gotta be the hardest way to do it.
That is a one gnarly creature! Makes our neighborhood Mountain Lions seem tolerable in contrast to those things.
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