Get your sleeping bags ready!
I'm always surprised to run into Arizona natives who claim never to have seen a scorpion. It makes me hesitant to mention how many I see on a regular basis. It's been my experience that admitting you've grown used to the presence of poisonous insects inside your home is like casually announcing you've had head lice four times: people privately wonder what it is you're doing so horribly wrong. Plus it automatically puts you on the dreaded "No Sleepovers" list.
We happen to have a lot of scorpions here. I'd forgotten exactly how many until I started searching the archives for proof. There was that time
I almost set a baby on top of one, my infamous meeting with the
ill-fated Bobby Scorpion, and the
time I impressed one with my mettle. I found
this, too, from the Google Fiction days. (I miss Google Fiction.)
Anyway. Lot of scorpions. I never thought it was that big of a deal; anything that can be killed with a size-eight shoe-- unless it has the power to scream, cry, or negotiate-- can't be that bad.
For the past few months I've been finding scorpions trapped in our kitchen sink. You bend over to fill a glass with water or lift a plate to load the dishwasher and
BAM! Scorpion in the sink. It's actually a pretty fortuitous place to find a scorpion; he can't climb out so he's not going anywhere, and you've got a strong stream of water and a big hole to flush him down right in front of you. It's a perfect set up, really. Unless you're the scorpion, in which case it's the absolute worst case scenario.
Last week I found three separate scorpions in the sink. By the time I flushed the third one I was adequately concerned.
Could they be coming up through the drain? I wondered. I do my best to maintain a thorough ignorance concerning nature, but I'm pretty sure scorpions aren't amphibious. And they're always in the right-most chamber of the sink, too, never in the left side, which seemed odd.
It was like a terrible light bulb flashed in my mind, then, a light bulb with big fangs and claws and a curly, crusty tail, and I slowly looked up at the ceiling. To a recessed can light directly above the right chamber of the kitchen sink. There was about a quarter-inch gap between the lipped edge of the light and the ceiling.
It's the perfect set up, really. Unless you're the human, in which case it's the absolute worst case scenario.
I immediately grabbed some packing tape and carefully taped the light fixture flush against the ceiling, all the while convinced that it was suddenly going to fall out of the ceiling and crash into the sink, dislodging billions of annoyed scorpions directly ONTO MY HEAD.
I wonder how many scorpion stings the average person can take to the skull. Admittedly I failed my "Venomous Head Wounds: Quantity vs. Quality" annex course, but I'm guessing it's less than a billion.
The exterminator came out this morning. When I set up the appointment over the phone, I announced that we had scorpions spilling out of a ceiling light. Having never actually caught a scorpion dangling five feet over the sink by a trembling beige bicep, I was bluffing. I was hoping the exterminator would express confusion over this impossibility so I could start sleeping again.
He imparted no such confusion. And this morning when I pointed out the can light in question, now securely packing taped to the ceiling, he acknowledged that yes, scorpions will crawl up the outside of a house and into the crawlspace and this is how they'll sometimes get down.
"I have this fear," I confessed, "that the light is going to fall out of the ceiling and forty million scorpions are going to pour out into my house."
He nodded, bending over his paperwork. "Everyone has that fear," he laughed.
I laughed with him. And reached up to the light to remove a piece of brown tape.
"Whoa," he stopped me, palms out. "Don't untape it."
He's sending out the scorpion guy tomorrow morning. Until then I guess I'll just use the bathroom sink for dishes. Baby crickets sometimes pop up out of the drain in there, but when you factor in the spiders from the skylight, the situation generally takes care of itself.
