SCORPIO!

15.10.2010: SCORPIO!
Picture this…after an enjoyable night on the tiles in the village, I return tired but unable to sleep. I turn on another episode of the Gilmore Girls on my computer and settle down for an injection of small town American eccentricity. By the flicker of my laptop I spy a shape on the side of my mosquito net. I squint, trying to make out the shape of this hazy outline. I move, it moves. I freeze, it freezes. Horror dawns on me, I am unsure if horror is a component of a scorpion’s psyche. YES A SCORPION PEOPLE…INSIDE MY BED NET. I composed myself, and gently extricated myself from the bed, and quietly considered my options. Even in the Amazon I was never faced with such an event. So using my late-night, beer addled brain, I grabbed my mosquito repellent and sprayed him. Obviously the fact that he possesses nature’s rather well designed armour meant that this was not too successful. So I hit him with a book…20 times. It was like a scene out of Psycho, but with a book, and in a bed, and no human blood was spilt (yet). Then I picked him up with tweezers by his tail and flushed him down the loo. I crawled into bed after a thoroughly checking for his mates, and fell asleep.

Exactly a week later, in pretty much the same situation, I felt something crawling up the side of my neck. Now the odd small fly can get in through the bed net, so I absentmindedly reached up to swat, and felt an unsuspected hard crusty outer skin, and then a searing pain. I whipped my left hand away, and with it came original Mr. Scorpion’s angry comrade/family member still digging into my finger. I threw him to the end of the bed, where I think I stunned him for enough time that I could successfully leap out of bed and call my housemate Faith. She came with a container and a handy show-shine glove and shepherded Bert (I name all things that I am fearful of, I have named many spiders in my time) into his container.
My hand was throbbing, and as many of my sensory nerve fibres were damaged in my car accident, the feeling was incredibly strange. Faith and I consulted book and discussed whether I would die during the night. After a lengthy discussion, I decided that if it was my time to go, then a scorpion sting would be a very rock and roll reason. I checked my bed again, and with intense bravery ( I feel), crawled back into my scorpion infested bed to sleep. The next day I could not use my middle finger, or most of my hand. However, I was not dead (bonus), and my arm had not become gangrenous either (result). I decided to inspect for their hangout area, but I found nothing. So I treated my new net and since then I have had scorpion free nights. So the moral of this story is….don’t beat a scorpion to death unless you’re sure you can take on all his friends.