Sunday

Around three in the morning, coming up the stairs from the kitchen, I ran into a large millipede. Certainly this thing wasn't as big as the evil zillipede I battled on the Greek island of Σαμοθρακη. That Mediterranean monster had to be trapped under a large metal ashtray and pinned down with furniture. Under all that weight, the zillipede was still able to bump the ashtray up and down trying to escape. Anyway, this whole Greek experience left me a little tetchy about millipedes. Look, they're like snakes and spiders mutated together: red tapeworm-like segments sporting thousands of little shrimp legs. Like some kind of nightmare. Yet it's still embarrassing to admit that, if the thing had come at me, I probably would have thrown myself down the stairwell. What's worse: when Sunshine goes to sleep at night, I creep out of the bedroom for roughly six hours until my own bedtime, leaving my shoes behind to pad quietly around the house barefoot. Enter some seven-inch adult millipede, uncannily wiggling from underneath the second-floor patio door just as I was stepping there too, carrying an armload CDs. Good thing the monster zigged instead of zagged, making a beeline for the linen closet. Otherwise I would have gone down the stairs in a rain of music. The linen closet door was open. Moving quickly, I had to make sure the damn thing did not get lost in our bedding, packed-up, and shipped to Vietnam where we'd one day discover its desiccated carcass. And if it laid eggs in there--I can imagine unfolding a sheet only to be hosed by millibrood like rice at a wedding. Really, this would not do. Really. I hurriedly dumped the CDs in a chair and slammed the closet door shut just in time--but the thing lunged at my toes and I hopped away. Extra uses for Under the Pink by Tori Amos: shooing a really pissed-off pregnant millipede away from the sheets. Down on all fours, bug wrangling, I was impressed by the thing's speed on all those legs; it finally stopped fighting back and shot off so fast that it just sort-of vanished. Then I was in a conundrum: where did it disappear, um, to? Outside, as it turned out; but I didn't realize that until I'd inspected and removed every stick of furniture from that side of the house. Discovering it outside later was a relief, and when Tori catapulted it off our second floor balcony I could hear it land across the yard: plop. After that I sat in a relocated chair ruminating over my new millipede fear--is there a named phobia for this? Yes, there really should be. [Cavin]