Fat and Potent Stingers
by Jonathan Penton

Whether you are interested or not (and some readers, astoundingly enough, claim to be), my damaged but undestroyed plans to move to El Paso are occupying most of my mind. The rest of my mind is occupied by thoughts of serial killers, and perhaps the remarkable fact that Kroger brand coffee tastes substantially better than Maxwell House, but those aren't the topics I'm going to write about today, or at least, any further than I already have. Maybe not much further, I mean, this is pretty good coffee, all things considering.

As a small child, I was moved from a tiny town in east Texas to an Atlantan suburb. When you move a small child, they are convinced that you have destroyed their world, and that they will never again be able to make friendships like the ones they're leaving behind. I pined for Texas for years, but I lost interest long before I reached puberty. Given my current full-time involvement in the arts, Texas has seemed more and more unlike the sort of place I'd want to be. Several people, when I've told them I'm moving to El Paso, suggest Austin as an alternative. After all, it almost has an arts scene. This suggestion is based on the erroneous assumption that there's anything that appeals to me about Texas itself; that I for some reason want to live in Texas, so wouldn't I want to live in the more artistic city of Texas, instead? In fact, I want to move to Mexico. That's the point of going to El Paso; it bears almost no resemblance to the United States.

So to the desert I go, and I intend to enjoy myself and get a lot accomplished. And if you've been reading my recent articles or corresponding with me lately, you no doubt feel that I'm getting a bit repetitive. Don't worry; that last paragraph was just intended to catch you up on the news. This update isn't about El Paso. It's about scorpions.

I am a full-fledged literal arachnophobe. I have a paralyzing fear of arachnids. Spiders don't bother me. I am terrified of scorpions, to the point that if I see one, or a picture of one when I'm not expecting it, I will curl into the fetal position and cry until long after it is gone. I am completely incapable of getting rid of a scorpion, should one be dangerously close. If by some chance you actually find a scorpion touching your flesh, you are supposed to remain rock-solid until it wanders off. I think I could manage that, but I suspect I would spend most of the day in that same rock-solid position (Freudian slip typed poison), sobbing hysterically.

This neurosis had very clear origins back in that tiny east Texan town, shortly after the birth of my oldest younger brother. I was barely four years old, and my father decided to take me for a night of camping, getting us both away from the infant, and offering us a now-rare opportunity to bond. My father and I have never been particularly good at bonding, and he doesn't know anything about camping, but we had high hopes and low ambitions. Fortunately, "camping" is pretty easy when you're in the middle of east Texas. It involved turning right out of our driveway, left out of the town, and driving a spell until all appearances of civilization ceased, which wasn't a long drive at all. Endless fields awaited us. Somehow, my father managed to pitch a pup tent and get a fire going (in the days before ready-light logs, no less!); we didn't need heat, but we cooked hot dogs and marshmallows. At some point during the evening, an extremely strange-looking bug, for reasons that remain a mystery to me, started marching into our fire. This is the sort of business that every small child wants to be involved in, and I marched over and hunkered my body down to grab the bug.

"DON'T TOUCH IT!" my father naturally screamed, and I kind of jumped off to the side. The scorpion continued it's march into the fire, roasting itself, much to my dismay. I protested that we had let the little bug die.

"That's a scorpion," my father factually replied. "Did you see it's huge, pointy tail? It can sting you with that."

"But it walked into the fire. Why did it do that?"

"I guess it likes heat. But a scorpion sting isn't like a bee sting. It'll make a grown-up very sick, and it can kill a child."

Now, in case the only scorpion you're familiar with is those sissy things that live in rotting trees on the East Coast, desert scorpions are a serious arachnid, far more dangerous than the tarantulas that live throughout Texas. Pale and large (compared to tree scorpions, anyway), they really can, and occasionally do, kill small children. My father told me the right thing, and I would never again try to pick up a scorpion. Instead, I would become utterly obsessed with them. Their image would haunt me, and I would seek that image out, in books, in natural history museums, or anywhere I could sneak a peek at my terrifying adversary. I became aware of the sissified East Coast scorpions, the menacing-looking but far less venomous breed. I'm still terrified of them, of course, and have in fact gone into the fetal position after being exposed to them, but hey, no sweat.

The nightmares started immediately after the camping trip. I would try to kill a scorpion by stepping on it, but at the last minute, my leg would buckle, and I would rather ineffectually try to knee the scorpion to death, only to have it sting and kill me. I don't know about you, but I die in my dreams all the fucking time.

When my brother started walking, the dreams changed. Throughout my childhood and teens, I would be walking out the door of a generic apartment, with my brother walking in front of me. He would bend down to examine a scorpion, and it would kill him. I would scream in pain and rage, and attempt to kill the scorpion by stepping on it, but then my leg would buckle again and I'd get stung in the knee and die, our legacy ending horribly. (I took my role as eldest child a little too seriously, I'm afraid.)

This same brother received a Christmas present from his in-laws; one of those tacky-ass dead-scorpion-encased-in-plastic keyrings, the sort that rednecks use to convince themselves they're bikers as they open the doors to their El Caminos. By now, you know doubt understand that it terrifies me. When I asked my brother to quit playing with it, he asked me why, and expressed complete ignorance of my arachnophobia. Every night, I would die in my dreams trying to avenge him, and he didn't have a clue. I must have told him (I tell everyone everything, as you may have gathered); I can only assume he didn't consider it an important memory. He remembers vividly the many times I woke up screaming from my chronic nightmare about the Smurfs, but nary a memory of my scorpion horrors.

So now I'm headed to the desert. Back to Texas, to the land of giant pale scorpions who consume cities and grab buses in their monster claws. Or something like that. Oddly, this doesn't frighten me. I suppose it's because I've lost all sense of shame. The idea of huddling in a fetal position crying sounds unpleasant, but not humiliating or particularly unusual at this point. I rest easy knowing if I do encounter a scorpion, I will tell the disinterested and interested alike, in approximately 1,293 words.

Jonathan Penton is the overworked editor and publisher of Unlikely Stories. Check out his literary works at this site.