When Scorpions Come to Call

As soon as the wife delivered her first child, a girl, her mother-in-law shouted angrily in her son’s face: “I never want to see any of you in my house again.”

The man obeyed his mother’s request and began to look for a little house that would accommodate his small family of three. After he checked his wife out of the maternity ward and moved her to her family’s home, he searched for ten days before he was able to tell her he had rented a suitable house for them near his place of work. He described the dwelling to her with a terse sentence: “The house is a small cottage next door to another cottage of the same size and construction.”

Delighted, she got ready, took her daughter in her arms, said goodbye to her family, and set off. A driver dropped them in front of two small doors made of rusty metal — at least that’s what a neutral observer would have thought.

“This is a dump!” She said with astonishment as she stepped out of the car.

“I chose the house on the right, because it has a garden,” her husband replied as he opened the door’s lock with a key, which wasn’t brand new either.

She was hardly satisfied with this house but thought it would be safe refuge from the maelstrom of problems her husband’s mother kept concocting to prevent her from continuing her university education.

Together they cleaned the house and organized its one room. Before nightfall the kitchen was operational. Although exhausted, she was able to prepare a rice dish and bean soup, and they supped and slept.

Because she was still on maternity leave, she didn’t need to rise early — especially not while her daughter was sleeping soundly. Instead she rose at ten, slipped on her plastic sandals, which were stationed by the door of the room, and headed to the W.C. It was a separate structure in the center of the garden, near the house’s entry. When she opened the door to the W.C., she was startled to find a black creature with hairy legs, much larger than her hand, floating on the water in the toilet.

A shudder spread through her body when she saw it floating there. She closed the door gently. Then she pulled herself together and raced for the large plastic basin in which they had packed small items for their move. She quickly filled it with water from the faucet, hoisted it with difficulty, and carried it slowly to the W.C.’s door, which she opened quietly so the hairy thing wouldn’t notice her and attack — or slip out to the house. If it did, she wouldn’t be able to deal with it the way she wanted.

She clenched her teeth in disgust when she saw that hairy thing floating on the nasty water and felt she would throw up. Steeling her nerves, she closed her eyes and raised the basin. She emptied the water on the creature all at once and heard the splashing sound of the water as it struck the black body. When she opened her eyes and didn’t see the creature anymore, she searched the W.C. thoroughly to be sure there wasn’t a similar beast there. Then she closed the door to the W.C., returned the empty plastic basin to its place, and began vomiting.

At 3:05 that afternoon her husband returned from work. While they ate lunch and drank tea together, she told him what had happened that morning and how she hadn’t been able to enter the W.C. till after 1 p.m. for fear another creature like the one she had seen would appear. He interrupted her as he started to rise and pad to bed for a siesta: “These arachnids are common in the summer.”

She was surprised that he didn’t ask her for details about what had happened and hadn’t even troubled himself to inquire how she had gotten rid of this intruder or whether it had been a venomous spider or a large black scorpion.

At sunset, she tried to forget what had happened and sat luxuriating in the calm ambiance of this place. The quiet seemed novel and beautiful. In fact, it almost brought a whiff of freedom, which was something she had lost when she married. She thoroughly enjoyed the idea that she was in control of her day, could sit wherever she wished, fall asleep and wake up whenever she wanted, and eat and drink whatever she fancied without anyone criticizing her. The only threat to this beautiful thought was her premonition that another wretched creature like the one that had spoiled the tranquility of the entire day with its unwelcome presence and forced her to spend every blazing summer minute searching the whole house for cracks and crevices — places where vermin and small noxious creatures might lurk — could visit. Since she hadn’t found any problematic holes, the toilet topped her list of possible dangers.

She brought a white plastic chair out of the kitchen, sat at the door of the bedroom, leaving it slightly ajar so she could hear her daughter, who slept during the day and, like other nursing infants, stayed up all night. The sun set very gradually till she could no longer see it, after it disappeared beyond the horizon, but only its golden rays, which dissolved with amazing elegance into night’s pitch-black cloak. This sight was so beautiful it scared her, and she rose from the chair like a sleepwalker and found the light switch. She flicked it on with her index finger and glanced at the lamp at the top of the wall as its light flooded the whole house. She turned to go back to where she had been sitting, but a rustling sound reached her ears. Alarmed, she twirled completely around toward the sound. With feet firmly planted on the ground, she opened her mouth as her pulse rate shot up. Then a shudder of fear rippled through her, filling her entire body, when her gaze fell on a procession of large yellow scorpions emerging from a hole that had been covered by a pile of sand and bricks leftover from repairs to the wall. She wanted to flee far from the line of scorpions, each of which seemed fastened by an invisible thread to the arachnid behind it.

But she couldn’t; her feet seemed glued to the ground. The sight of the open door to the bedroom alerted her to the great danger that could strike her sleeping baby should these scorpions merely change direction and crawl in there.

She gained control of herself, summoned her reserves, and raced to the bedroom, from which she emerged again shortly with a long wool shawl wrapped around her head and wearing a long tunic that reached to the soles of her feet, which she had stuffed into wool socks and plastic shoes without heels. She gently closed the door of the bedroom behind her and checked to be sure it was securely shut. Then she quickly ran to the other side of the house to fetch a heavy, wooden-handled mattock, which the landlords had used to plant a garden, from the corner where it was propped. She had trouble carrying it because it was heavy but ran with it toward the procession of scorpions, which were slipping away and creeping off to cover large areas of the wall. With all her might she struck the first scorpion and felled it to the ground. Without taking time to ascertain whether it was dead, she felled the next one with an even more powerful blow. The more scorpions she knocked off the wall, the more daring she grew at confronting them as they seemed to move in different directions. Some even went into their attack mode, raising their tail high and exposing the venom-filled glandular sac at the end.

All the same, she forgot her fear and followed them when she saw the bodies of scorpions felled by her mattock’s blows, which were so fierce they threatened to bring the wall down. After a skirmish that lasted a full half hour, the earth of the garden was filled with bodies of dead scorpions that had begun to glisten in the gold light of the lamp. The woman stood, leaning on the mattock as she listened for any rustling from these dying bodies. She breathed a sigh of relief once she had assured herself that these golden venomous blots had totally lost the ability to move. She allowed the mattock to slide from her hand to the ground and headed to the faucet. She turned it on and filled her palm with water to wash her face. Then she went to the kitchen to fetch a metal container filled with kerosene and a box of matches. She placed these beside the water tap. She used a broom to sweep the bodies of the dead scorpions into a pile, poured kerosene on the pile, lit a match, and held it near the pile. Finally, she returned to her chair to watch the golden bodies glow even more incandescently as they burned.

When the golden color of these tongues of flame faded and gradually turned to ash, she began to remove her outer garments, one at a time. She quietly opened the door to the bedroom and entered it. She really wished she could take a cold bath then, but her daughter was stirring. So, she couldn’t. She hastened to the baby, checked her clothing, and found it wet.

Her husband returned home at ten that evening. After eating his supper, he watched a football game on television. He didn’t notice the smoky smell that permeated the whole house. She wondered about this man, who seemed to have inherited his mother’s apathy. Ignoring his indifference, she said as succinctly as she could: “Do you know.... there are scorpions in this house!”

“Ha... that means that we didn’t rent the house with the large black viper. That’s good!”