Mukade

Oh MAN! I think summer has finally arrived. For one thing, the Ojika horizon has been so thick with humidity, everyday a haze hangs in the sky. For another thing, I contemplated turning on my A/C today for the first time today. (This may have been a bit premature, but I'd returned from a bike ride and I was HOT. I opted for a cold shower instead.) And finally, to my horror, I found the first mukade of the season in my house just now.

Mukade are the poisonous centipedes that often travel in pairs and scurry around in such a gruesome way that even tarantula lovers would wince at their creepy approach. They're the kind of house guests which leave you scratching all over at possible, invisible contact with your flesh. They're the kind of intruder which leave you shuddering from head to toe long after they've been sprayed to death with clouds of insecticide, or boiled to death with a splash of hot water. They're disgusting and never welcome, even if it means that summer is here.

I happened to kill this mukade without even knowing I'd done it. I was fixing dinner and had boiled some udon noodles to make a pasta salad. I'd left them draining in a sieve in the sink and went about cutting some veggies and cheese. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something kind of crumpled up in my sink. At first I thought it was a plastic wrapper of some sort that didn't quite make it into the garbage. Then I took a better look.

The deep green, sectioned body was twisted up like a cooked shrimp; it's orange legs and stinger rigid and forever posed in a last act of failed escape. Even thought I knew it was deceased, I couldn't bring myself to pluck it from it's resting spot and toss it into the trash. I used long cooking chopsticks to nudge it (with my eyes closed) an inch to the right where it plummeted down the drain, where I'm sure it's now on a journey out to the Ojikan sea.

Sayonara.

I don't even want to think about where it might be right now if I'd decided to make a ham sandwich for dinner instead.