I was sitting on the living room floor yesterday when a large, roach-like bug crawled across my upper thigh.
Like many people, I hate roaches. They are creepy, disgusting, and terribly resilient. My hatred, however, extends beyond the normal dislike into the deep-seated paranoia range. I have nightmares about encounters with roaches. I have woken up in a cold sweat, waving my arms in the air to ward off a phantom roach. I moved away from Charleston partially because of the thriving roach population. If given the choice, I would prefer to have my home infested with mice or pythons rather than find a single roach. Even the name makes me want to rip my tongue off and flush it down the toilet.
So naturally, seeing what I thought was a roach scurrying on a part of my body had me moments from dying of horror.
I screamed several times and frantically tried to swat the bug away. It took three smacks to send the bug flying onto the carpet, at which point I jumped up, burst into tears, ran into the kitchen, and stripped from the waist down. Then, while I cried in my underwear next to my discarded clothes, Bobby caught the offending bug and carried it outside to kill it and dispose of the body.
It turned out to be some sort of beetle, or at least that’s what Bobby said. The nagging voice in the back of my head doesn’t believe him, though, because he and I both know that if that thing had been a roach, we would be moving out today.