Rube Goldberg and Satan planned this.
Let me explain. I must first and foremost assure you that I did not make this up. I couldn’t make this up; it’s far too horrific.
Last night, whilst I lay peacefully in my bed, slowly falling asleep after a day wrought with cabin fever inducing trivialities and boredom, my roommate suddenly sprung to life. I in my restful state, however, did not see him leap out of bed and dash to the front of the room. It had been dark when I set down my book (“In Cold Blood” by Capote), turned off my reading lamp and closed my eyes. Suddenly the overhead light was on again; my roommate was clasping his hand in pain. “Dude, dude, I got bitten,” he said. I was groggy, exhausted, half asleep. I didn’t understand what was going on. “What?” I asked him, utterly confused. “What happened?” He came around the curtain which separates our sleeping areas and looked at me, his hands clasped and his eyes wild, “It bit me man.” I blinked against the light, bewildered by the situation, my confusion compounded by his answer. I asked him what bit him. “I don’t know,” he answered, “I was lying in bed watching a movie and I saw something kind of like moving on my poncho liner; I had it pulled up to my chin. I kind of reached down without looking and felt something that felt like twigs. It was about as big as my hand, I mean, I could fit it in my hand and hold it. And then it bit me so I threw off my poncho liner and got up.” He started jerkily removing small items from his bed: his towel hanging on a bed post, his pillow, his poncho liner. As he removed the items, he threw them on the floor, jostling them with his foot as he did so, searching for the culprit. I sat up, now wide awake and somewhat alarmed. “Wait; what bit you?” “I don’t know man,” he replied as he continued reservedly sifting through his stuff, “I think it was a camel spider.” This little tidbit of speculation made me feel sick. I hate camel spiders. Some of you may remember a posting not too long ago wherein I recounted my experience of having a camel spider hurriedly scaling my shorts en route to my neck so he could chomp my jugular. I’ve since seen them in the gym and outside at night, lurking in the dark. To put it mildly: I don’t like camel spiders. That being said, the idea of a camel spider biting my roommate and escaping into the recesses of our camel-spider-hiding-spot packed room made me, shall we say, a little edgy. I got out of bed, (it was 2AM mind you), and started helping him search for the hell spawn; I wasn’t going to be able to sleep until the blood-thirsty little cuss was found anyway. It wasn’t on his pillow. It wasn’t on his towel. He picked up his poncho liner, draped it over a chair, and started peeling back the folds. Eventually he pulled up a fold exposing the beast. But it wasn’t a camel spider. It was a scorpion. 3 or 4 inches in length, off-white in color with its stinger tail curled up in waiting. We scooped up the scorpion in a water bottle with the top cut off, and my roommate went to see the medics with the scorpion in tow should the sting prove to be poisonous.
The sting wasn’t poisonous and he’s fine. But it doesn’t end there.
He came back from the medics an hour or so later; I was still awake, thinking about scorpions and how many scorpions were inevitably in my bed at that very moment. He came in the room still holding the water-bottle prison we’d fashioned for his assailant. He set it down on a shelf. He vowed to keep it as a pet. The next morning, (that is today, and was in fact 2 or so hours ago as I write this), my other roommate decided to take the scorpion outside to take a picture of it for a PowerPoint slide in a meeting we have tonight. He got the shot, brought the bottle back into our room, and set it on a different table. A table that happened to be in the direct blow-path of a fan. A table that touched the foot of my bed. He left the room and went back to the office. While he was gone, the fan blew over the water bottle prison. The scorpion escaped. I was the first one back in the room after the escape; I walked in and saw the bottle knocked over, devoid of a scorpion. I solicited help from my roommate who’d been stung. We grabbed a black light which one of our neighbors had, turned off the overhead, and searched every nook and cranny of our room. Eventually we found the little demon half dead under a book case. We decided to make him all dead. He’d made his way back to my roommate’s side; I think he was on his way back to have another go.
The photo today is, predictably, of the little bugger that did the stinging. My roommate is holding it in the hand which was stung. Walk a mile my friends: imagine finding this guy, very much alive, in your bed. Then imagine it stinging you. Then imagine catching it and feeling relieved, only to have it escape and lurk, once again, somewhere in your bedroom. Horrific.
