Thomas Wolfe was totally right. I can’t go home again.

This has been an extraordinarily bad week for me and bugs. I’ve been looking in the paper today for an apartment because I can’t go home.

Monday it was the spider. Last night…I can barely tell you of the horror.

Let me preface this story by saying we’ve had a lot of rain this monsoon. A lot of rain. Rain makes the creepy crawly bugs come out of the woodwork.

Oh the horror.

I went to bed pretty early for me last night, around 11:45. I climbed into bed and put my iPod on. I always go to sleep with my iPod on because My Honey has a SERIOUS SNORING PROBLEM. Yes, indeed, it does warrant all caps. His snoring is out of this world extreme. Once I fall asleep, he won’t wake me up. My brain has long added his snorting, snuffling, kicking, and all around obnoxiousness to the list of acceptable noises during the night. The problem is falling asleep. I can’t fall asleep with all that bullshit going on less than a foot away. The only way I am staying out of prison is by wearing my iPod.

So I was all stretched out on the bed, covers pushed aside because it’s so freaking hot, with Mozart cranked up pretty high. I don’t want any hearing specialists telling me how awful that is. Honest to Zeus, it’s either the iPod or I spend the rest of my life on the lam for murder. I love My Honey and, without even going there to check it out first, I’m damn sure I don’t love prison.

I felt Jojo Kitty jump up on the bed and rustle around by my feet. I figured he was playing with one of the dog’s tails and he’d settle down in a minute so I mostly ignored him. I was just on the cusp of sleep, Carmina Burana – O Fortuna playing in my ears (there couldn’t be a better soundtrack for this little event, believe me) when I felt something skitter across my thigh. I recall thinking it was the cat’s tail and I reached down and brushed it off.

I heard it thunk against the wall.

Oh, sweet Jesus, hold on to your seats people.  

“That wasn’t the cat,” the ever alert animal part of my brain informed me with some urgency.

I reached over and turned on the bedside light and – HOLY SHIT – there was a giant sewer roach on the wall about four feet from the floor.

Now I suspect the big cat, Geddy, brought the thing in the house because he does that from time to time, half dead birds, mangled mice, de-tailed lizards. Then I think Jojo got ahold of it to play with and assumed I’d be just as delighted with his new toy.

I was not.

The giant bug squatted there on the wall, his antennae wavering menacingly. Jojo crouched on the floor beneath it, staring up with the intensity of a full-grown tiger.  

I woke up My Honey with a great deal of vigor, as I’m sure you can imagine. “That thing,” I told him in a strangled voice and pointed with  a shaky finger at the intruder, “just crawled across my leg.”

I was making an Olympic sized effort to keep control of myself. I figured the entire neighborhood didn’t need to be awakened by my screeching. I took off down the hall to fetch some instrument with which to kill it. Maybe the vacuum? A .357 magnum. An asteroid. A thermonuclear weapon.  I ran back to the bedroom with a fist full of paper towels. I figured as soon as My Honey killed it he could use the towels to clean up the carnage.

Obviously, I wasn’t thinking clearly. Back in the bedroom in less that five seconds, I was greatly disturbed to find My Honey still in bed, although he was leaning forward and peering at the insect by the light of the 25 watt lightbulb. It still sat on the wall, suspended above the twitching kitty who was making the very same cooing noises he makes when he’s stalking one of us in play.

Why the hell was this bug not already dead?

 And then the worst possible thing happened.

In slow motion, Jojo Kitten sprang from the floor, leaping four feet vertically in the air, and reached for the bug. I leapt to catch hm before he connected and My Honey yelled, “No, Jojo!” The sound of his voice came out in super slow motion, the same as the sluggish movements of my arms and legs, as if we were both drugged.

None of that mattered because Jojo swatted the bug off the wall and sent it careening into the gloom not illuminated by the meager light beside my bed.

Mommy!

Jojo was going insane, flinging himself from nightstand to bed to the floor and back again, chirping , hunting for that bug. The three-inch bug that was now loose, in my room, under the bed, ON MY SIDE. My Honey did not valiantly rise from the bed, gleaming sword in hand, to systematically disassemble the bedroom and slay the bug. No, he did not. He lay back down. He stupidly offered me a flashlight so I could crawl around and look for it myself.

Yeah, that wasn’t happening.

I tried to lay down, music back on in my ears, tried to ignore the sounds of the hunting kitten. Everytime I would unclench just a little, I’d feel that phantom sensation of the bug running across my leg. I gave myself fifteen minutes of barely suppressed hysteria before I got up from the bed and went to the livingroom.

Sleep was elusive there, too. The heebie jeebies are not easy to cure. Every bug you’ve ever encountered slithers out of your psyche to say visit and remind you of past terrors. Around 3:45 when I was still wide awake and staring at the livingroom ceiling I thought I was going to have to call in sick from lack of sleep.

I went to work, which was probably best. What I need right now is sleep and I’m not sure when I’ll be able to go back into that room again.

If I’d been left alone there, in that house all day, haunted by the idea of that super-sized insect, I suspect there would be no house left by the time the family came home. A charred and smoldering hull would sit on my lot, littered with bullet casings and the remnants of an atom bomb.