Vinegaroon

Alyssa heard the baby cry in the next room and opened her eyes. The red numbers of the alarm clock leered through the dark. She muttered, "Shit." It was three in the morning. Only two hours since she'd last put him down. Maybe Darren was working on an ear infection. It was unusual, even for him, to be up so often during the night.

She covered the long T-shirt she slept in with her robe, letting her fingers caress the silk collar. She pulled a diaper from a laundry basket full of clean but unfolded clothes and tossed it across her shoulder before making her way to the baby's room. The week before Christmas she'd confronted Billy with collected evidences of an affair. He'd slammed the door as he left and two days later came back, this store-wrapped robe and a sack of presents for the two kids in his hands.

Caitlin was on to her father. She'd refused to play with the presents in that sack. Billy had missed her kindergarten Christmas program even though he'd promised her he would come. But that was before he'd stormed out of the house. It had broken Alyssa's heart, seeing the girl standing on her tippy-toes, watching for her father to come through the door while she absently sang, "Here comes Santa Claus, right down Santa Claus lane." But he hadn't. And even the hot cocoa Alyssa bought her at the Astro Diner did not cheer her up. When no one was looking, Caitlin had stuffed the baby's presents back into the sack with her own. And she spoke to her father only when she had to, and then in single syllables.

Unlike Caitlin, Alyssa had been unable to resist the robe with its gold and black finger-leaves on an aqua sea. It was beautiful and made her feel beautiful when she wore it. Even at three in the morning. And it wasn't something Billy could have gotten at the commissary or in town. Not that there was much in town beyond what was offered on the base. They'd lived in some strange places, but this desert outpost had to be the worst.

Darren settled down within minutes of being carried to the rocking chair and was soon sleeping again on her chest. She would take him to the doctor in the morning. Maybe her neighbor, Kelly, would watch Caitlin for her for a few hours. She might squeeze in a half-hour nap if they didn't take too long to give Darren the antibiotic that would, if it was an ear infection, ensure her sleep not that night but the next. She tucked the baby into his crib and yawned, already dreaming about that half hour.

The dry air sucked the moisture from her mouth. She'd never get used to it here. Hopefully she wouldn't have to. When Billy got back from Iraq, he was supposed to leave the marines and this miserable tank division. They'd move somewhere closer to her family. He'd promised.

She went to the kitchen for some water and flipped the light switch. Two steps past the door she saw something the size of her palm near her bare left foot. Instinctively, she stepped back into the doorway. The creature also moved back, away from her, but slowly.

Maybe it was a scorpion. Over a neighborly coffee one morning, Kelly had warned Alyssa about scorpions, about how she had to shake out the kids' shoes before they put them on, just in case one had crawled into them during the night. She bent over. The beast moved further away. Could it have seen her? Its head, what was clearly its head, was pointed the other way. Up close it didn't look like a scorpion. When she was young she read her horoscope every day in a paper that printed little symbols for each sign. She was a Scorpio, so she thought she knew what they were supposed to look like. This monster was almost black and had the curved pincers of a scorpion but its tail had no stinger. Rather it was long and thin and quivered in her direction like a car antenna in the wind.

When she was young and lived in the suburbs, they captured the occasional spider that found its way into the house with a wad of tissue and flushed it down the toilet. She shuddered, imagining how this horror would feel through tissue. The front part of its body had more than enough room for all eight legs, but a second segment was easily half again as large. She'd never seen a bigger, uglier fiend. She needed something substantial. She glanced around, but her shoes were in the other room.

If Billy were here, he would have taken care of it. But he wasn't. Of course, you couldn't really blame him for that. He had no choice about going to Iraq. But even before he left, there was that woman. She used to think women were just as good as men and should be allowed to fight along side them. Now she wasn't so sure. Not that she'd changed her mind about female capabilities. Just the side-by-side part.

Of course, Alyssa assumed the affair was over. He'd come back to her, hadn't he? But she checked the list of who had shipped out with the unit. And the woman's name was on it, clear as day. Of course, Billy didn't know she knew that name. But there's more base gossip than sand at the bottom of the town swimming pool, so it wasn't hard to find out. Once she'd decided to. Once she was finished pretending everything was fine. Alyssa tightened the belt of her robe. If she ran to get a shoe from the other room, it might escape and hurt one of the kids. A broom stood against the wall near the light switch. She picked it up, but the creature moved under the edge of the cupboard. On her hands and knees, she poked it with the head of the broom.

She heard a soft "pfut" and the air around her smelled of vinegar. A thin spray dampened the floor near the bug. She took a deep breath, her nose wrinkling against the smell. Kelly had told her about these too. And she should know. Her husband had been stationed here for years. What had she called them? Vinegaroons? Harmless, she said. This one didn't look harmless.

Alyssa set the broom down and bent over the creature, unable to take her eyes off it. Fascination like when she discovered the name "Lisa" on a slip of paper with a telephone number written in Billy's handwriting. The note paper, like what she used for her grocery list, fell from the pocket of his camouflage pants when she was doing laundry. Fascination when she called the number and listened in silence to the woman on the other end say, "Hello? Hello?" and once more, "Hello?" before she hung up.

The beast used its front legs like antennae, touching the cracks in the linoleum and the cabinet edges. She touched a toe to one of those spindly legs, expecting the monster to back away. Instead, it grabbed the toe in one of its pincers. She suppressed the scream of surprise and pain and kicked her foot in the air, sending the vinegaroon smashing into the cupboard door.

The baby liked to play with the pots and pans she stored in that cupboard. He'd spend hours pulling each pot onto the floor. With a wooden spoon, he would pound on them, cooing and laughing and driving her nuts. That's what he'd been doing the day she couldn't take it any more and whisked him into the car seat. They dropped Caitlin at Kelly's and Alyssa drove through town until Darren fell asleep in the car seat. She hadn't been looking for Billy. But she found him, standing outside a bar as she drove by, his tongue deep in a woman's throat, and his hand down her camouflage pants.

By comparison, the vinegaroon pinch wasn't painful at all. But only by comparison. She rubbed her toe, keeping her eye on the horror which was now actively trying to get away. On the counter above the cupboard was a cup in the shape of a seated polar bear. It had arrived with three yellow roses in it not long after she and Billy started dating. The flowers had died within the week, but she'd kept the cup, filling it with pencils and pens. Orange scissor handles poked up above the red eraser tops of the pencils.

The scissors were light in her hand. The fiend was scuttling along the floor, under the lip of the cupboard. She pulled the broom over and blocked its path. Then, before she could think and before it could change direction, she closed the scissors where the two segments of its body joined. She felt rather than heard the crunch of the exoskeleton. Pulling it from under the cupboard, she watched its fluids ooze around the scissor blades.

She scooped up the carcass in the dustpan then wiped down the blades with a paper towel. "That'll teach him," she said.