Fish tales

"Millipedes can be easily distinguished from the somewhat similar and related centipedes, which move rapidly, and have a single pair of legs for each body segment." - Wikipedia

Perhaps this particular Wikipedia contributor was trying to be funny. When you are chasing (or being chased by, as might more aptly describe this situation) a giant centipede, I don't think counting legs per segment is easy, nor is it anyone's priority. But let me start this story from the beginning.

A few days ago, Morena told me that she thought she might have a rat or a mouse, because she kept hearing these sort of scuttling, scratching noises at night. I hear so many noises at night, I didn't put much stock in her fears. Tonight we were in her room having dinner and watching TV. In the show we were watching, one of the main characters was afraid of rats, and jumped onto the table, screaming, when a rat escaped its cage during a biology experiment. A few minutes later, Morena muted the TV because she thought she'd heard the suspicious sounds again, but I heard nothing. Then, a few minutes after that, I heard it too. Morena looked around and all of a sudden she was screaming and jumping on the bed, much like the guy on TV had done a few moments ago. She claimed she had seen a giant centipede, and spread her hands to indicate the size at a scale that belonged in a fisherman's story of the one that got away. But it was nowhere to be found. I wondered if it had been a shadow, or at least a smaller bug, and a primed imagination. We spent the next ten minutes rearranging furniture, sweeping under things, and generally whacking everything in sight in hopes of causing the centipede to reveal itself. When nothing happened, I left, but told Morena she could come get me if it reappeared and she needed help. About five minutes later, there was a frantic knock at the door. It had reappeared, but it had also disappeared again. Five more minutes of pacing and whacking and watching. Nothing. I left again. No more than a minute later, Morena was at my door again. "It touched me! It came up behind me!" This time I stayed in the room, and Morena waited outside. By now, she had sprayed so much 'organic bug spray' in her room that I felt like wherever it was, it was probably dead. It didn't come out. Something about my presence seemed to keep keeping the elusive creature at bay. So we switched. Morena went inside; I stood right outside the door. Thirty seconds later she was scrambling to open the door. And then I heard it. It sounded like there was a small dog on the other side of the wall dividing the living room area and the bedroom. And then it appeared. And it was huge. Huge like the width of my thumb. Huge like ten inches long. Morena hadn't been spinning tall tales. Lucky for us, the (very swiftly moving) centipede wriggled its way to the corner where the refrigerator stood. Whichever way it came out, one of us would get it. I sprayed it with what little was left in Morena's can of bug spray, and it rounded the corner. It got to the door and I whacked it with a broom like the centipede was a piñata full of candy. To no avail. "Open the door!" I opened Morena's door and this giant creature, unfazed by a bug bomb's worth of spray, unfazed by physical onslaught, sped off into the dark wilderness just outside our dorm.

I only wish I could have gotten a picture. If you're really looking to inspire some nightmares, it looked something like this.

In other news, I'll be in Tra Vinh this weekend visiting Violet, my fellow ETA and (evil?) twin.