We’ve lived in this house for four years come October.
In that time, we’ve had snakes. A tarantula. Countless big, hairy spiders. A gecko. A gazillion and one lizards. Horny toads. I could go on. But you get the point.
After having lived here for one year I came across a scorpion. A bark scorpion. Which, wouldn’t you know, is the deadliest kind. Jeff promptly disposed of it without incident. We went about our business, paying extra attention to shaking out our shoes. Our vigilance lasted a couple of weeks.
And then we went two full years. Without a single scorpion sighting.
Last weekend we had some friends over for dinner. After the meal, we locked occupied the kids in the playroom with a movie while the adults played a board game and imbibed.
At one point our friends’ son came crying from the playroom, saying his toe hurt.
His toe showed no signs of injury. No marks. No swelling. Nothing. But he was clearly in pain. He described it like a thousand needles pricking his skin.
Ouch.
I assumed that maybe we had a staple coming up from the carpet and that he’d caught the wrong end of it.
I went on assuming that until last night. When we solved the mystery once and for all.
We sat down after dinner to watch the Chronicles of Narnia with the kids. We pulled out all the pillows, cushions, and blankets, just as the kids had done the weekend before.
After the movie, Jeff was cleaning up popcorn kernels and blankets when he, too, got a toe injury.
Only he wasn’t so quick to pass it off as a random carpet staple. Mostly because his injury didn’t occur on the carpet.
At first he thought he’d stepped on a leftover popcorn kernel. But when his toe went prickly numb he had second thoughts.
A scorpion.
A bark scorpion no less.
A bark scorpion that stung him not once, but twice. The first time when he initially, accidentally stepped on it. And the second when he went back for the kill.
That second sting may have slowed him down, but the kill eventually came.
Squished that sonofagun and flushed him. Taught him a thing or two about showing his nasty exo-skeletal self around here.
I guess we’re true Arizonans now.
We’ll be shaking out our shoes for awhile.
