Fear the Crab

Last night I found a small scorpion in my bathroom. It was just sitting on the floor.. well, perhaps sitting is not the right word, but it was simply there, and not moving much at all. At first I thought it was dead, but it made a little twitch in my direction. I showed my dad, and he mentioned that it’d been years since he saw a live scorpion.

Then he killed it with his slipper.

The smashed corpse was wrapped in a paper towel and stuffed into a glass bottle that was going out in the trash. In the end it was rather anti-climactic.

It reminded me of the other time I saw a scorpion, roughly that same size. It was at George’s house, and we found it in his sister’s closet. It was captured and put in a glass jar, and then someone mentioned that scorpions glow in black light. It just so happened that the sister had a black light lamp, so we pulled that out and turned off the lights and turned on the light. And it’s true, they do glow. It’s kind of weird, in a creepy sort of way.

George then figured that he should use the black light to check for more scorpions, so he pulled it over to the closet while the rest of us sat in the dark. I think we started discussing why there are scorpions here, and how much of an infestation there was in the islands.

That’s when George screamed and dropped the black light lamp. As he bolted up, the rest of us cleared the floor, thinking there was a massive invasion force nested in between the denim and cotton. I don’t think any of us have moved that fast, ever, and we probably mastered the art of levitation if only for a few seconds. What was worse was that when George dropped the lamp, the bulb fell out and so the room was plunged into darkness. Meaning we couldn’t see squat of what was going on.

So amidst the screaming and the jumping and the banging into furniture and other people, someone had the intelligent idea to turn on the lights.

And we see a cockroach scurrying away.

Turns out the roach was in the lamp hood, and when George started moving it around it tried to run, and ran up his arm. That’s what he felt, and that’s why he screamed. At least, that’s what he’s claiming to this day. I know I was freaked trying to avoid stepping on the little stinging bastards that I thought George had unwittingly unleashed upon our pink toes.

In the end we caught the roach, and threw it into the jar with the scorpion to watch them fight. Oddly, they both died.