Angela Dove: Award-Winning Writer

If only I had done some mild stretches before leaping out of bed and across the room in terror.

I remember waking up that fateful morning, stretching, yawning, blissfully ignorant of the evil at hand. I remember wishing I had used the timer on the coffee maker so that I a steaming pot of consciousness would be waiting for me in the kitchen. Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw a dark shape on the ceiling. I stared at it curiously since, being farsighted, I couldn’t make out the exact shape. Then the thing scuttled across the ceiling.

Let us pause our story briefly to note that “scuttling” is a diabolical trait in a bug. Dragonflies fly, butterflies flutter, grasshoppers hop. But only evil bugs scuttle.

“Oh my goodness!” is the cleaned-up version of what I exclaimed as I sprang from my bed. “What is that?”

My husband, whose eyes are equally useless at distances, fumbled for his glasses. He inspected the shape with no urgency. “Some big bug.”

He said it as if there we were not under attack from the very minions of hell.

“Well, get it!”

“What?”

I pulled my head out from under the covers. “Get it.”

Some minutes later, my husband and I examined the bug, now confined to a large, clear ziplock baggie. My husband vetoed the minion of hell option and ventured that it might be a large silverfish. I pointed out that not only had it scuttled, but that it was now clearly writhing, which is almost as evil as scuttling.

“Let’s just release it outside,” my husband said, whose Gandhi streak appears at the most annoying times.

“No way! I don’t want it in the yard. He’ll be able to report back.” My husband cocked an eyebrow at me.  “This one is the scout,” I explained. “If we let him go, he’ll report back to the rest of them that our house is a great vacation spot.” My mind reeled with images. “They’ll all come scuttling across our ceiling while we’re sleeping. Maybe right above us. Maybe some of them will be clumsy—“

My husband grabbed my arm as I headed back under the covers. “First, even if it is a scout, I think it’d report back that the woman of the house is crazy and they’d be better off going somewhere else. Second, why don’t you take it to the County Extension office and have them identify it? Then we’ll know more about the situation.”

Thirty minutes later, I packed up the kids and the demon-in-a-bag and headed drove to the extension office. I noticed that it kept clawing its way up the side of the bag, then flipping over on its back with every turn of the car. It looked like a scene from an insectile version of “The Exorcist.”

Once inside the County Extension office, a very nice man took the cursed bag from me with great interest. He agreed “minion” was a good guess, but my husband remains convinced that the guy was just having me on. He inspected some online resources and finally pronounced the thing a centipede. Then he explained that (1) there may be quite a few more in our basement, and (2) no, he did not have a blanket in his office under which I could hide.

The rest of the weekend was spent cleaning out the basement. My husband moved boxes; I swept, dusted, and wielded a crucifix. Eventually we determined that the centipede was a loner. When I reported the good news to my Facebook buddies, one of them—an engineer and humor writer in Atlanta—made me a window decal to commemorate the occasion. I have no intention of displaying it, as it may interfere with my ability to suppress the whole ordeal.