Greg A. Brown

Originally published 04/16/07 in the Kansas State Collegian

Like most, this story has an auspicious start. I went into the bathroom for my morning shower and had just taken off my glasses when I discovered The Centipede.

See, centipedes like dark, damp places, and the only such place in our bathroom was the bunched-up folds of the shower-curtain.

When I shoved the shower-curtain over to one side, a small brown fuzz zoomed along the floor toward the toilet stall. Having my glasses off, I couldn’t really see the legs of the small brown fuzz.

House centipedes are mostly legs, so my glasses not only clicked those into sharpness but also made the bug look about five times bigger. Uh-oh.

Acting on a mental level somewhere between muscle-memory and sleep-walking, I somehow grabbed a plunger and plopped it down on top of the centipede, trapping it underneath and buying myself some time.

At this point, you probably should know a few things about your average house centipede.

(No, I didn’t run screaming from the bathroom to frantically ask the Internet about my problems. That happened the last time I encountered one of these beasts.)

Anyway, house centipedes were carried over to America by unnamed European explorers sometime during the 19th century. They like to eat other bugs, but when provoked, they can have a nasty bite.

The latter half worried me, especially since I read it on Wikipedia. You never know how those wacky Internet entomologists will try to play a joke on you.

So there we were, house centipede, plunger and me all stuck in that bathroom. And that Wikipedia page didn’t tell me whether or not centipedes were super-strong or able to lift heavy weights or a million other things that could get them out from under that plunger.

One thing was sure: I couldn’t jump into the shower or leave the bathroom without in some way solving the centipede problem. Shorn of any outside resources, I was left with the way I knew to deal with bugs: stomping them.

But stomping seemed out, as I was barefoot and not about to make a mess by using my towel or something else to shield me from bug guts. Beyond that, trying to hit a moving target was utterly beyond my capacity at that point, and I had doubts about just pressing down on the plunger while maintaining a seal and preventing its escape.

This was about the point that my internal monologue started to sound like a Monty Python Skit.

What else do we do to bugs? We spray them!

What do we have to spray them with here? Air freshener!

So my plan was set: lift up the plunger a crack and spray the air-freshener into it at short range.

It wasn’t exactly the stuff we used on wasps as kids, but it still had chemicals with long names on the back, so I figured it would work just as well.

My tactic went as planned, with the exception of the air freshener not even having time to aerosolize, resulting in blobs of smell-good rather than a fine mist.

The centipede was doused with the stuff, and even if contact wasn’t enough, it probably would get hungry and try to munch down on the coating of Lysol.

Worries assuaged, I went on to take my shower. But I don’t know the eating patterns of a centipede, so I haven’t lifted the plunger since then to see if my plot took effect.

So if a mutant centipede shows up in a few weeks and starts trashing the town, feel free to blame it on me.