###
Present Day
Joel walked to the closet and grabbed a dress shoe. He needed a new pair, so he didn’t mind using this one. But it was a difficult bond to break—those old, cherry-colored shoes literally carried him to his success.
He walked across the carpeted floor and crouched in a corner. This was a posture with which he was much more familiar in the past. It was his ability as a baseball player, as well as his prowess as a team leader, that catapulted Joel to his first professional contract.
On the baseboard, a translucent creature, a scorpion, snapped its two claws curled its tail upward. Shoe in hand, Joel cocked his right arm and struck the bug. Hoping to see it plastered against the baseboard, he swallowed hard when the pest crawled on the sand-colored carpet, alive.
“You get it?” Sonnet asked, sitting on the bed behind him.
“No.”
He wanted to squash the thing where it sat but felt compelled to keep the carpet clean—he and his wife had yet to spend a full week in this house. Instead, with the tip of his shoe, Joel lifted the creature off the carpet and pinned it against the baseboard. Scorpions weren’t the jumpy sort, but he still worried about the thing hopping over his shoe and stinging his hand.
With the creature dead to rights, Joel gritted his teeth and applied pressure. Sonnet had told him cutting off the tail was the best way to kill a scorpion.
Crunch!
Sonnet gagged. “Eww.”
“I think he’s dead. Got his tail.”
“Good.”
Joel tore a flap off one of the moving boxes, scraped the bastard’s remnants off of the baseboard, and took them to the bathroom. He tilted the cardboard slab over the toilet and watched as the creature descended to its watery grave. Joel then flushed the toilet and emerged from the bathroom. “We shouldn’t see another for a while.”
Sonnet sat on the edge of the bed, facing away from Joel, arms pressed across her thighs. While small, no other scorpion was more venomous in North America than those found in the Arizona desert. Its poison was known to cause a variety of ailments ranging from numbness at the site of the sting to paralysis, shortness of breath, or even—in the rarest of cases—death.
Joel took off his polo shirt and khakis, and dropped them on the floor. He plopped onto the bed, wearing nothing but his boxer shorts. With his head on his pillow, the man looked up to the ceiling and put his hands behind his head.
“Tonight was fun,” he said.
“Let’s call the exterminator tomorrow.”
“Good thing I went to the liquor store today. Almost ran out.”
Sonnet still had her back to her husband. “It’s not even scorpion season.”
“I don’t know if Sam had any fun, though. She was kinda quiet, don’t you think?” Joel looked over to Sonnet. She was still sitting at the edge of the bed, lifeless. “Sonnet,” he said. No response. The man sighed loudly. “It’s dead already. Get in bed.”
“Did you know scorpions mostly feed at night?” Sonnet asked.
“Stop.”
“I’m sorry, they’re scary! Their tails…” she shuddered.
“You Google too much,” the man laughed. In truth, he was almost as scared of scorpions as she was. But Sonnet’s fear was laughable. How could anyone be that paranoid? Her fear agitated him. He was able to forget about the insects. Her continual recitation of every zoological fact on the insect, however, made it difficult for him to ignore that scorpions did exist and the two of them lived in the scorpion capital of America.
Sonnet turned off the bedroom light and turned on her UV flashlight. Because of their lucid anatomy, the bugs glowed a greenish hue under a black light. She scanned the room with her flashlight, finding nothing.
Joel turned on his lamp, cancelling out the flashlight. “Okay, time for bed.”
“Joel,” she whined.
“You didn’t hear a thing I said, did you?”
She climbed under the covers. “You said you were worried about Sam.”
“Yeah.”
“No surprise there.”
Joel rolled his eyes and grunted. “Hey, don’t get me started on Scott.”
“What about Scott?”
“He had his eyes on you the whole night.”
Sonnet laughed as she rested on her side and propped her head up on her hand. “Oh, whatever.”
Joel motioned for Sonnet to stop moving. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
“Thought I heard something.”
Sonnet shrugged.
Joel waited for another sound that didn’t come. “Yeah, so, Scott…he doesn’t seem off to you?”
“He’s nice.”
“You think everyone’s nice.” Joel was glad Scott was just the couple’s real estate agent. As such, their paths were not likely to cross for a long time, if ever again. Something about Scott bothered Joel but he was too good at his job to let him go.
Joel turned to his raven-haired partner. In this setting and in this lighting, Sonnet looked the most appetizing. She was relaxed, venomous arthropods notwithstanding. Her hair shimmered like a diadem against her fair skin, her nightie revealing just enough to tease.
Sonnet placed her arm across his stomach then settled her head on his well-defined chest. He wrapped his right arm around her and kissed the top of her head before turning her on her back. He placed one hand on her hip as he teased her neck. Sonnet turned her head to allow him easy access. Joel felt her abruptly dig her finger-nails into his back. This was the reaction he wanted … until he felt Sonnet’s body stiffen.
“Oh my God!”
Seeing the dread on Sonnet’s face, Joel turned.
A scorpion.
On the bed.
It raised its tail and wielded its claws. Joel jumped off the bed, pulling Sonnet with him.
Sonnet trembled and held her hands to her mouth. “Oh my God. Kill it.”
Joel looked for his shoe until Sonnet picked it up and handed it to him. Turning back to the bed, Sonnet let out a whimper.
The beast was gone.
“I’m not sleeping up here tonight,” she said, her eyes darting to every corner of the floor.
“I second that.” He took her hand and headed for the door.
“Wait.” She picked up her UV flashlight. As she came back to Joel, it happened again. That noise.
“That coming from the attic?” he asked.
“It’s probably thunder. Let’s go.”
Joel opened the bedroom door which led to a huge loft area. He reached for the loft’s light switch when Sonnet tugged his arm.
“Check first,” she said, brandishing the flashlight.
Joel made a face.
“Please.”
Joel took the small flashlight and turned it on. He scanned its purple luminescence across the loft.
Nothing.
“We’re good.” He flipped the switch, illuminating the loft and all four bedroom doors. The bedrooms—save for the master—were unoccupied. Two of the rooms were being utilized for storage. Joel hoped to have something else to put into one of those bedrooms in short order.
As the couple walked through the loft toward the stairs, Joel found himself relieved that Sonnet asked him to check for more scorpions; their coloring was similar to the home’s carpeting. Joel led the way down the stairs toward the darkened foyer. He pointed the flashlight toward at his feet. Sonnet had told him that, unlike bee stings, most scorpion stings occur when people don’t see them.
Down in the foyer, Joel continued to scan the travertine floor with the flashlight. When the couple moved into the living room, they heard a clinking noise. As the noise grew closer, two glowing discs appeared in the dark distance.
“What the hell is that?” he asked.
Sonnet breathed a sigh of relief. “Tony.” The couple’s orange tiger tabby responded with a meow, jingling the bell on its collar as it strutted towards them. Sonnet picked up the cat as the couple walked into living
room.
Joel turned on the living room light before starting toward the kitchen. “Want some water?”
“Please.”
“Our house documents are somewhere in here, right?”
“Yeah, why?” she asked, taking a seat on one of the couple’s new couches.
“I wanna check the pest inspection report again.”
“I’ll find it, honey,” she said with a reassuring wave. “Go get some water.”
Joel turned on the kitchen light and looked at the floor before scanning the rest of the room. He still felt the need to pinch himself. Even after signing his first pro baseball contract, he never imagined building such a large house with this caliber of gourmet kitchen. The land on which the house stood was a steal—it sat lifeless, unwanted after a nearby meteor crash a half-century ago—but the house itself cost a small fortune to build. Thanks to the abilities he first showed at a young age, Joel was making a good living as a leadership consultant.
He walked around the island, toward the corner of the room, but stopped in front of the sink when he heard a chirping noise. Joel looked at his feet.
Nothing.
He continued into the corner of the kitchen and swung open the cabinet door, careful not to place all of his fingers on its edges. He looked inside.
Nothing.
With both hands, Joel grabbed two glasses. He put one on the kitchen’s granite countertop and held the other under the water with his right hand. He looked at the glass, and a jolt shot through his spine; a scorpion clung to the rim. Joel yelped and dropped the glass in the sink.
“What was that?” Sonnet asked from afar.
Joel hesitated. “I saw another one,” he eventually said, scratching his suddenly itchy skin. He heard Sonnet mumble in disapproval as his attention was drawn elsewhere. The chirping noise grew louder. Joel bent, and with one eye partially closed, peeked underneath the sink.
Nothing, save for more chirping.
Joel looked at the dishwasher next to the cabinet. No way, he thought. He held his ear to the machine. Joel swallowed hard and grimaced. With an unsteady hand, he opened the dishwasher.
Joel nearly fell to the floor. “Shit!”
The dishwasher was crawling with scorpions. With the hair on the back of his neck standing at attention, Joel couldn’t look at the dishwasher, yet he couldn’t turn from it, either. “Don’t come in—”
Before he could finish his sentence, Sonnet stood in the doorway, hand over her mouth to muffle her inevitable scream. “Close it, Joel! Close it!”
With a persistent itch consuming his entire body, Joel lifted the dishwasher’s door with his foot before shoving it shut with his hand.