Centipede of the Year

To the centipede I tried to kick down my drain but refused to go. I see you there. Being better than eighty-two percent of the men I’ve dated.

You creepy-crawled out of the drain. I screamed like an old-fashioned actress. High-pitched and startling. Then, I toed you back down. Steam blossomed over the bathroom, a ghostly mushroom cloud. I could barely see you. But you returned covered in a nest of dark hair. Most wouldn’t come back. Most would get the hell out. Like Stan Prince circa ’98. That was a bad year.

You know, it was a shower beer kind of night. You probably watched as I poured myself into the tub, half-drunk, bad-breakup-battered. The water spray felt like bullets, and for a second, I wished they were. You saw that. Still, you came. You stayed. 

I knelt down and picked you up in the palm of my hand. Your hundred little legs danced a tune in my palm. You were happy. I wasn’t. We could do great things together, you said.

If great included finishing my shower beer, then I was all ears.

With one arm, you beckoned that I come closer. That arm was bedecked in a glitzy bangle. The other arm, to your right and thirty arms back, laid inert. It sported a masculine wristwatch. Shower centipedes are not conformed to the laws of gender-specific fashion.

“Are you my little love bug?” I whispered. I giggled because it was nuts. There I was, naked, my hair like soupy udon noodle waves, talking to a bug. I’ve done worst things. Here’s looking at you, Dennis Booth and the ten-inch dildo we dubbed Ripper.

“I am,” you replied. “Now let’s go teach men to get this bad love off your chest.”

Fuck yeah.

I dressed, grabbed my shower beer, and we were gone into the night.

It’s fun to pretend we took a race car but really we were on my Huffy 10 speed. The bike was an extra-special birthday gift after I caught my mother swapping spit with Uncle Patrick. I never sold it. That memory meant I had some kind of power. I mean, if power back-in-the-day meant wielding braces and training bras and crippling secrets, then power it was.

I stepped up, to porches, to patios, to rickety trailer park screen doors. I knocked. I thought I was going to be sick. Then, all my exes answered, fear and doubt in their eyes, worried I came to rage. You perched on my shoulder. A one-hundred-armed angel in my ear. To propel me forward, to confess to men I gave blue balls, to men who gave me black eyes, to men I’ve pretended to love and men who’ve played with my heart like a teething necklace.

There, I raised the shower beer. All night long, I toasted truth to boys with green eyes and men with bikini girl bicep tattoos. My tongue went numb. The words tumbled like dice. I didn’t make sense; I made sense. I watched their bodies wilt, and felt my own lengthen.

Finally finished, done, kaput, wiped out like that song with the manic babbling voice, I

stumbled away to the curb. My chest as empty as a shower beer. I sat in the ditch and watched the spokes of the Huffy glitter in the moonlight. But what was moonlight without a beer? I hefted the can in my palm. It was still full, but I felt lighter for its weight. Like a train wreck with no crash. Under a gold-gilded streetlight, I closed my eyes, whispered, thank you. And then you were there. Beckoning me to follow. The comfort of your one hundred little legs further on up the road.