"Oh My God!" By Don Taco

"Oh My God!"

By Don Taco

  Something brushed his foot. That's how it all started. That's what got his attention. It turned out to be a centipede. He spotted what he presumed was the tail end emerging from the lawn, and realized that it had crawled onto his foot, clad only in flimsy sandals. As that nether end appeared out of the carpet of grass, its business end encountered his pants cuff, and, in the manner of small mindless creatures, it chose a direction at random. 

  Recognition of the danger triggered his reflexes just as the tail followed the head under the cloth of his trousers and up the inside of his leg. At a surprising speed. Its movement reminded him of nothing so much as the awkward hurried progress of the rusty but functional electric toy train set that his father had set up for him in the garage every Christmas, the flimsy boxcars and caboose obediently attempting to trace the path of the overworked engine. He wonderd if his father hadn't actually set up the trains every year for himself, filling some childhood need that marriage and a career had never addressed. 

  A violent and almost involuntary shake of his leg failed to dislodge the poisonous insect. The same motion, and its lack of a satisfactory result, also brought forcefully to his mind other possible consequences of annoying the bug. He started anticipating the bite. Or sting. Did centipedes bite or sting? Did it matter? He didn't know either answer, although he rapidly began to worry that he would soon find out.

  His mind and body began to cooperate in the release of chemicals that would create a full state of panic, the better to fully appreciate and enjoy his experience. Time began to slow down. A prickly flush ran out to his nerve ends. His skin overheated. His gonads performed a distressing and uncomfortable animal dance, trying to crawl hurriedly back into the warm safety of his inner body.

  Another spasm shook him as he again attempted to throw the creature back to the earth it sprang from, or at least dissuade it from its present path. With his heightened frightened senses, he could now tell exactly where the centipede was, as the tiny pincers on its multitude of feet gripped, now here, now there, on their trip across his overexcited nerve ends. It had reached the inside of his knee, and exhibited no signs of changing course or of slowing down, although it did seem slightly hampered by the restrictions of his clothing, and was traveling nowhere near as quickly as it had across the open plains of his foot.

  A rapid involuntary extrapolation of its current speed and direction, and what lay there before it as a target destination, keyed his panic level a few more notches up the scale.

  He yelled forcefully towards the house for help, as he stamped his foot again, and and set his brain afire in a desperate search for some option to consider, some decision to make, some action to perform. A breathy adolescent squeak emerged from his throat instead of the enraged masculine roar he had commanded his body to produce.

  It was probably just as well, at that, since something about the unnatural tone and timbre engaged panic centers in his wife's brain, and elicited an automatic response that no amount of ordinary cursing or shouting could have drawn forth. There is still something of the wild animal deep within us that knows when another is hurt.

  As one part of his brain balked at admitting to himself that the awful squawk had really been him, his hands moved, as if by themselves, and grabbed for the cloth of his pants to halt the centipede's progress, at whatever cost. It had reached the folds of his pocket, and its direct movement was just beginning to be hampered, forcing it to take some other action than its straight line travel. He grabbed, and crushed, and pinched, and pressed, desperate to avoid an encounter between the creature and some precious nearby obstacles it seemed about to reach. All vanity fled. He howled wordlessly for help.

  The biting started. Frustrated in its forward momentum, and then rudely assaulted, the centipede retaliated in the manner of its kind, thrashing about for freedom, and biting again and again as the frenzy of its own brand of panic took over its actions. It was like dropping a burning match onto bare skin when the first bite came, but his handhold on the beast was so clumsy and tenuous, and the consequences of letting go so potentially damaging, that he could do nothing but cry out. 

  As the anger of the first bite increased, the next several bites added their own mindless agony. For a brief moment, he considered releasing his hold, to tear at his belt and remove his pants, but before responding to the rash impulse, he saw that his wife had arrived. 

  "Centipede!"

  "Oh my God!"

  She clawed at the hook of his belt. 

  He remembered a story one of his drinking buddies sometimes told, about the spring day that Uncle Henry decided it had thawed enough to begin to clean out the shed. Half of Henry's family was aimlessly watching through the kitchen window, dawdling over breakfast, as he came out of the barn, tugging his floppy old felt hat into place atop his exceedingly bald head. Henry took eight steps across the yard, and fell over dead. They found six black widow spiders in the hat, none of them large. Henry had been careless and hadn't checked.

  How poisonous is a centipede? He didn't know. It wasn't the largest he had seen, but it could not have been less that eight inches long, and by now it had bitten him at least five times.

  The belt came loose and the zipper tore as they frantically pulled the pants away and down. He danced away madly, searching himself to make sure it wasn't still attached, tears interfering with his sight, limping as the already puckering skin pulled tight against the still burning wounds. 

  The inside of his thigh swelled to the size of his fist before they reached the car. His wife drove. The thigh area  was larger than a pineapple before they arrived at the hospital, and lines of a fiery red and a vicious blue-purple were radiating from it as his body's mechanisms dissolved trying to carry away the poison. But by then, he was deep enough in shock to remain amost unaware of how much he hurt.

  How poisonous is a centipede?

  "Oh my God!"

  

  The doctor said there were a total of eight bites. He was sure there were closer to two hundred. He was home from the hospital three weeks later. None of his functions were impaired. He refuses to speak to anyone about the experience.