I want everyone to share in my moment of terror.

First off, let me just say that I enjoy horror movies and novels, I don't scream on roller coasters or when friends jump out of the darkness with a shout and fingers bared like claws, and I'm less likely to kill a spider than to pick it up and put it outside. That being said, when in the shower tonight, I picked up a wash rag only to see it give birth to a GIANT BLACK CENTIPEDE, and I heard myself screaming like a victim in a zombie film.

Previous to tonight, I'd thought that the only non-deadly insect that I had an aversion to was the earwig. Centipedes are like earwigs x 100.

C > E.

Before I could find something that I disliked enough to smash it with, it crawled into a crack in the wall. I spent the next ten minutes cowering in the far corner, trying to wash myself from a small distance while also checking the inside of my shower bottles for danger without taking my eyes off the spot where it had disappeared. When it reappeared, the sight did not illicit a lessor reaction. After the next few banshee-like shrieks and a minute of total paralysis in which the creature did not crawl back into it's lair, I threw the aforementioned rag over it and bludgeoned it into oblivion with a bottle of hair product. Bludgeon, pause, repeat.

Since the centipede's near-certain death was not enough to release me from the grip of terror (and since I was born with the unfortunate lack of a lazy eye and thus without the ability to watch both the crack in the wall and the rag simultaneously had I decided to simply put it aside to wash later), I grabbed the rag with a trash bag, threw on a towel, and rushed it to the trash bin in the front yard.

I felt the inappropriacy of my state of undress as I made my way back to the house, but as I rinsed my hair, I knew that had another centipede crawled Lazarus-style from that wall, I would be down the block in seconds, and likely in a lack of apparel that would have put Lady Godiva to shame. That is, assuming my heart was still beating after three such I'm-bleeding-in-shark-infested-waters sized adrenalin shots.

So the point is, I'm writing this to resist the compulsion to search all my clothes for any sign of my shower-demon's spawn, and to distract myself from the question of how I can check the insides of the seams without staying up all night and destroying my entire wardrobe. I hate spring.