The Mattawan Mothers sent out an advisory to their email list regarding the centipedes that had been nesting in local sandboxes. They were an invasive species with venomous front legs, maybe carried from Brazil in the belly of planes refueling at the airstrip. Those legs had almost evolved into mandibles. Some of these creatures were a foot long, wide as a man’s thumbnail, yellow-orange like a grapefruit rind. The young ones were black— they mellowed with age. The Mothers sent this description along with their advisory.
That week, Claire stayed home with her daughter, whose complexion had gone humid and jaundiced, whose sentences meandered discomfitingly, dizzying the listener, which was her, Claire. She monitored her fever with an ear thermometer shaped like a taser. She stuck her hand through an open sliver in the sliding door to feel how warm it was outside. It was August. The centipedes couldn’t survive for very long, not unless they dug deep down.
The apartment whined all over. Old place, full of ghosts. The bathtub was continuous with the floor tiles. Hunched over it, she bathed her sickly daughter, as her Cro-Magnon ancestors might have in hot springs. The water couldn’t keep her daughter warm for long. She shivered. The thermometer read 99.5 degrees. Children’s aspirin. SpaghettiOs. Dora the Explorer on Netflix.
On day five, a centipede crawled out of her daughter’s ear canal. Claire watched it happen. It happened in the half-light, as she sat over the covers stroking the child’s back, the child already unconscious. It happened in between furious blinks, a fit that strained her eye muscles. In the morning, she searched her daughter’s room for it, checking her stuffed animals for torn seams, unshelving storybooks, rustling through dirty laundry. It was clean, as was the bathroom and the living room and their kitchenette. Claire reheated the SpaghettiOs and moved on.