A Bugs Life

Evan, 9 and I, 11 stood armed with all of the cleaning supplies from under the kitchen sink, and stared down at the mess we'd made on the carpet of our parents' new house. Kerry Franklin was not going to appreciate this. Somewhere beneath the pile of Ajax, dishwashing liquid, 409 and Pinesol was a very clean, very dead arachnid. It wasn’t until we snapped out of our spider attacking trance that we'd realized the full implications of what we'd done.

"Mommy is going to kill us," I say.
"Yep," he agrees.

"Why didn't you just use a tissue?" My father asked later after our beating and grounding. Yes, we in foreign families get both.

Of course, a tissue. Why hadn't we thought of that? Well dad, we were saving the extreme methods for a last resort, you know, in case the chemical warfare wasn't effective.


A tissue. That would require touching the spider, though not directly, per se, close enough. You see, though our parents grew up in countries with flying roaches, tarantulas, lizards, etc., Evan and I did not, and were deathly afraid of anything that moved but didn't speak, bark, meow or moo. Our public enemy number one: bugs. And no bug was exempt. I can't speak for Evan, but I myself, don't even like butterflies. I did however thoroughly enjoy A Bugs Life, but as mentioned above, those bugs satisfied my speaking criteria.

We never really learned our lesson after that day, but we did learn to be more discrete. The vacuum became our best friend; however, if a bug happened to find itself on an easily cleanable surface, all methods became fair game.

******
When my brother announced that he was going to join the Peace Corps, and spend two years in Morocco, it came as quite the shock.

"Evan, you do realize that there are bugs in Morocco right? The kind of bugs that laugh at our bugs. The kind of bugs that inhale Raid to get high?"

He said he was well aware and was okay with it. Okay. Well God speed brother. And after our first few conversations, he'd had me convinced. He didn't mention anything about the bugs in Morocco and so I had no choice but to assume I was the last remaining shame to the Franklin clan doomed to fear bugs for the rest of my days. Until last week that was...

"I just spent the last hour and a half shooing roaches from my room," he said.
"Eww," I said. "That's disgusting."
"I get no sleep cause I spend the whole night with one eye open. I don't know what to do. It’s not like my wicker door acts as much of a fortress. They just crawl right back through the holes."

I shuddered, and noting the obvious distress in his voice, repressed the urge to say, I told you so. Roaches. Though I think spiders are considerably worse, and Evan would agree, roaches are still way up there on the list. This was what he signed up for so I guess he would have to just deal. Still roaches. I couldn't shake the image.

The next day I spoke with him again.

"How's it going?"
"Remember when I said I couldn't sleep because I was scared of the roaches?"
"Yeah?"
"Well now I'm a little more afraid of the animal that ran into my room at 3 am, ate one of the roaches and ran out."

I was silent for a moment. "That's unfortunate," I said.
"Very," he agreed.
"What was it?" I asked.

"I described it to someone and they said it sounded like a hedgehog."

Hmm. I'd have to check and see what we had under the kitchen sink because I'm pretty sure a tissue was not going to suffice.


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