- Intro question option 1: Your worst or grossest job? Example: Sterile processing technician (cleaning bloody surgical instruments).
- Intro question option 2: Your most interesting wildlife encounter (briefly)? Example: Living in a Phoenix condo infested with scorpions.
You use one of these intro questions/examples at the start of each college semester. Often you need to memorize the names of a hundred first-year writing students. Fast. And eliciting personal anecdotes from the students helps.
What you seldom tell students is that the sterile processing job came from Mom’s connections at the Arizona hospital where she worked. And you never say there is more to the scorpion story beyond woman versus nature. It’s more of a woman versus nurture tale that starts with a three a.m. image: your mother, naked and drunk, stumbling out of an empty bathtub. You had followed a bang and giggles to find Mom in your bathroom. After she lunges to slam you between the door and the wall, you coax her back into bed, where she stays for the next twelve hours.
That afternoon you ask her, “Do you remember?”
She glances away and drags on her cigarette. Her face stays blank like the drywall in her bedroom. Built five years before, this four-bedroom house still has blue surgical drapes instead of curtains. You notice that she has spliced a brown extension cord onto your old TV. She should have fixed her one-armed eyeglasses instead.
“As far as I can tell, you had a blackout.” (Later you’ll match this with #4: Have you ever been unable to remember part of a previous evening, though your friends say you didn’t pass out? –Seven Major Symptoms of Alcoholism)
No answer.
“Maybe you need help.”
Mom’s eyes water amid the flakes of yesterday’s mascara, but then her mouth tightens and her gaze turns acidly on you. The message: She doesn’t have a problem, you do.
You retreat, reminding yourself that last night really happened.
Mom will stay in her room until she needs another carton of cigarettes or yet another bottle of Jack Daniels. She usually times her shopping trips so she can stop on her way home from the day shift at the hospital. (Symptom #2: Can you handle more alcohol now than when you first started to drink? or Self-test: Do you try to avoid family or close friends while you are drinking?)
Sunday, June 17 (defense)
Weeks later, your cocker spaniel, Penny, pounces on what may be the biggest cricket ever. She loves to catch crickets and spiders so their legs wiggle through her teeth like floss. She had lots of crickets to play with at Mom’s place on the other side of Phoenix. In your new home, however, Penny doesn’t attack a cricket.
She dashes past you into the walk-in closet, thunks your gallon-sized blue vase into the wall, turns her stubby tail, and flees. In the great room she paws at her curly red ears and rubs her freckled face on the carpet. When you check her for injuries, she responds with the usual slobber and panting.
Back in the closet the cubbyhole near the vase is dark, so you crouch down on your hands and knees with a flashlight. That’s when you see it on the drywall, curled like a sand-colored fishhook, maybe two inches long. You had been walking toward it, a bulky box in your hands, your feet bare.
Until this moment, after almost twenty years in Arizona, you’ve only seen live scorpions in a desert museum. An ultraviolet light made them glow blue-green.
The rest of Sunday evening is spent on the phone:
- Emergency vet—Penny isn’t vomiting or having trouble breathing, and she is a healthy two-year-old, so no need to bring her in
- Poison control—Proactive questions in case you get stung
- Mom—A registered nurse
The one call you should make, but don’t, is to break the days-old lease on the townhouse. Also, you should have known something was off when the Realtor’s assistant calmly arranges for an exterminator, but you’re jumping ahead.
You: There’s a scorpion in the closet. What should I do?
Mom: Smash it!
You: (Although obvious, smashing it hadn’t occurred to you.) How fast do they move?
Mom: Not too fast, but I don’t know for sure.
To avoid any other scorpions camouflaged amid the tan carpet, you put on your cross-trainers and return to the closet armed with a sword-like screwdriver from the toolset Mom gave you and a Pyrex pitcher you never liked. If you or Penny have to go to urgent care, a specimen will help. Before moving, you prepared for many emergencies. But not even the Reader’s Digest Household Hints & Handy Tips, another gift from Mom, covers scorpions.
As you ease closer to the scorpion’s elliptical body, you watch its eight legs move like an impatient person drumming their fingers on a tabletop. The scorpion is loaded in the front with miniature lobster claws and in the back with a segmented, tapered tail and stinger.
With the pitcher below the scorpion, you try to herd it down with the screwdriver. It curls its tail over its back aiming at the tool and scuttling faster than you would like. Escape isn’t an option, so you jab with the blade of the screwdriver. The scorpion’s tail is almost severed from its crunchy body when it ticks into the pitcher.
You take a deep breath and call Mom back.
You: It’s sealed in a jar. Do these things come in herds or pods or whatever?
Mom: They might. Moving near an irrigation canal might have something to do with it.
You: Hmm. (Frowning at how water and canals have any connection to scorpions.)
It is after ten o’clock. Mom says she’s going to bed, which means she won’t answer the landline no matter how long it rings. You give Penny her usual dog biscuit to entice her into her crate for the night.
Sitting on the bed, you scan the ceiling and walls for scorpions. You kick off your shoes, turn out the light, and flop back, but you keep feeling tingles on your skin. You switch the light on twice to shake out the sheets and assure yourself that no scorpions are in your bed.
Monday, June 18 (offense)
Forty-five minutes after lodging a complaint with the Realtor’s office, you’re talking to Michelle from Alpha Exterminators who says, “Scorpions are real hard to kill. We’ll have to use extra chemicals.” (Note: Names have been changed throughout this text.)
“Will those chemicals hurt my dog?” You look at 28-pound Penny, whose short-cropped fur reveals her chubby back. She mouths everything, testing the foodish qualities of the world.
“Nine out of ten times the chemicals won’t hurt the dog,” Michelle says.
If the scorpions were in Mom’s house, she would probably ignore them just like she had the crickets or the bloated ticks that climbed the walls only to linger at ceiling level. A decade ago, when your friends were grounded for poor grades or breaking curfew, your newly divorced mother seemed unconcerned or unaware about your near-failing classes or that as a thirteen-year-old you stayed out until 2:30 in the morning. The message stuck: No one else cared, so you better take care of yourself.
* * *
“Where’d ya see ’em?” The guy who exits the Alpha Exterminators truck offers no introduction, but the embroidered patch on his shirt reads “Doug.” Overdressed for the 109-degree heat in brown big-and-tall polyester-looking pants, he grabs his canister of scorpion-killing chemicals and motions for you to lead the way.
Penny yips with excitement as you unlock both the courtyard gate and the townhouse’s front door. “The neighbors say they’ve got them too. News to me, but the last woman who lived here moved out because of them.”
“Scorpions are hard to kill.” Doug repeats his company’s spiel about lots of chemicals.
Penny, upon hearing Doug’s voice, switches to yelly barks. Doug retreats a step but then sees that she resembles an animatronic stuffed animal.
You maneuver Penny into the courtyard and Doug through the door.
Once inside, Doug turns right and starts spraying the baseboards. He only has eyes for the ribbon of white. You run ahead of him to pull furniture away from the walls so he can get the best shot with his chemical wand. Once Doug finishes the master bedroom’s perimeter, you put Penny in her crate and catch up with him in the kitchen. He opens the pantry, where the attic’s access panel has been askew since you moved in.
“Are they coming from the attic?” you ask.
“No. Too hot for ’em up there,” Doug says. “Usually find them where it’s moist under sinks, near dishwashers and washing machines.” He gestures with his wand. “They have real thick skins so unless you spray them directly, it’s almost impossible to kill ’em.” He turns right to resume his tour of the baseboards until it leads him out the front door.
Outside Doug hands you a clipboard with the invoice. After signing it, you follow his gaze past the chain-link fence one condo away. The running water of the Western Canal glistens, and a leathery woman jogs past on the bank. You’ve read that canals such as this one were built on a network dug by the Hohokam starting around three hundred A.D. How had the First Nations handled scorpions?
“That’s probably where they’re coming from.” Doug reclaims the clipboard. “They like it among those rocks by the canal. Lots of places to hide and insects to eat.”
Maybe Mom knew something about scorpions after all. You put off calling her. You’re still relieved at not having to balance your daily life against the incidents that frequent hers—the chipped toe bone, the sickeningly deep forearm burn, the half-smashed windshield, the smoldering carpets, the “migraines.” Instead of seeking treatment for her injuries, she would get x-rays, silver burn cream, or a prescription for migraines from the surgeons at work.
As you walk inside, Penny barks her demands to be free from her crate, and your sigh of relief stutters when your body refuses a lungful of sharp-smelling chemicals. The baseboards are still wet. No scorpion could get doused with that and live, but the insecticide will soon dry. What then?
Saturday, June 23 (defense)
The combination of allergies and lying in the hot Arizona sun can lead to a Zen-like connection to the deep bass of your own pulse. That’s the plan. You’re already sweaty, and your sinuses itch from cleaning the dust-coated townhouse that had been for sale for months before you rented it. In the courtyard, you hose grime off the lawn chaise. This leads to jetting dead leaves off the brick walkway and watering the drought-wracked hibiscus.
Your cross-trainers are squishy with water, but you’re not taking them off. When you rinse your dust-gray knees, you’re rewarded with the chilly sensation water gives off when drying in a breeze—the principle behind evaporative coolers used in some older Phoenix homes. The water droplets tickle and you glance down, sure a fly has landed on you. Ready to shoo it away, you halt. Instead of a fly, a pale scorpion, weighted with water, is slogging upward above the knob of your knee. You whisk it off with a stream of water, throw the hose down, and shudder your way indoors.
In the bathroom, adrenaline throbs through your chest, spreading to your arms and legs. You turn on the shower and realize that maybe scorpions don’t like water. Why else would the arachnid climb you like a wall? You feel safe in the shower. Not so much when you shake out your towel and step barefoot onto the bathroom floor.
Saturday, July 7 (defense)
Late and overheated, you wake up with the sun striping through the mini-blinds. Penny pants beside you on the bed. She stares at the wall above your pillows, and you roll onto your stomach to see.
Over the headboard, a scorpion curls in an ampersand shape on the Navajo-white wall. Penny lurches toward the scorpion as you pick her up to stash her in her crate.
With your knees on the mattress, you crawl-walk toward the wall, brandishing a taupe leather pump like a hammer. The scorpion doesn’t move until the heel of your shoe lands on it with a crunch. It convulses, hanging in the air millimeters away from the wall, before falling.
A search of the carpet, headboard, sheets, pillows, and comforter yield nothing. No scorpion. No proof the threat has been eliminated. You strip the bed and remake it with clean sheets, watching where every toe and fingertip ventures. The old sheets go in a hot-water-wash cycle with bleach.
These days your first move out of bed is to put on your white huaraches, which you check before inserting your foot. You shake out shirts, skirts, and shorts before dressing.
At the mailbox, the neighbors commiserate about the scorpion problem. Tom, the pudgy dad next door, claims he’s been stung a couple times and each time gets worse. B.J., the office worker who lives closer to the canal, discovered one crawling toward her on the carpet while she exercised. As renters, you and B.J. request regular exterminator visits. Tom, however, owns his townhouse and refuses to waste money on the problem. You imagine your scorpions retreating to Tom’s until the chemicals clear.
You seek information, similar to the research that yielded .gov-checklists, a self-test, and the “Seven Major Symptoms of Alcoholism” article that aligned with most of Mom’s behaviors. You find an Arizona State University “Ask-A-Biologist” transcript that reports “some scorpion species have documented lifetimes in excess of 25 years.” Another scientist in a newspaper article says scorpions have a waxy outer coating that allows them to be one of the best water conservers in the desert. No doubt the coating keeps insecticides from harming them too.
Friday, July 13 (offense)
The dead:
- A flat, desiccated scorpion on the floor of the outdoor storage closet
- Another pancaked on the pantry floor
- A third belly up in the center of the pan needed for an omelet
Fewer live ones are getting away.
You encounter one when moving the vacuum cord. The scorpion prowls along an insecticide-treated baseboard in the great room. Your tool of choice in scorpion disposal: needle-nose pliers. With the tool’s pincers, you launch a sneak attack aiming for where the abdomen tapers toward the tail. When nabbed, the scorpion whips its stinger around intent to strike.
You deposit it in the pitcher, which contains the first scorpion Penny pounced on as well as the ones collected since. That test-tube shaped pitcher will never see orange juice again.
With the scorpion depository stashed under the sink, you reconsider breaking the lease. The scorpion situation might be bad, but does it rival the daily dread of driving into Mom’s stucco subdivision? Would the house be burning? Surrounded by the flashing lights of first responders? Another neglected pan smoldering in the oven? Another cigarette dropped on the couch? Would she turn her handgun on herself or you?
Moving back home with Mom would mean retreating—what you’d watched your mother do for more than a decade. (Symptom #5: Do you drink heavily when you are disappointed or under pressure or have had a quarrel with someone?) For years, Mom’s interests hadn’t extended much beyond Jack Daniels (grandpa’s favorite), Marlboro Lights, and PBS cooking shows, although she seldom cooked anymore. (Symptom #3: Have any of your blood relatives ever had a problem with alcohol?) “Before” the divorce, she made tuna casseroles, ricey porcupine meatballs, and cinnamon buns from scratch. “After,” as a single parent, her kitchen included past-due milk that poured out in chunks, diet cola, and multivitamins. She had little interest in your teenage cooking successes—fettucine Alfredo, ham and Swiss popovers. But she did eat your failures—cheese soufflé (made with American cheese).
How can you be sure Mom’s an alcoholic? How is true alcoholism diagnosed? You can’t see it like a crushed limb. You can’t smell it like gangrene that eats you alive. You can’t hear it like a smoker’s wheezing cough. You can’t touch it, because it lives deep inside. If it had a taste, it would be that of liquor, thousands of tastes, thousands of drinks. But just about everyone knows at least some of those flavors, and they aren’t all alcoholics. The best you can come up with is that Mom uses alcohol to numb life’s pains, difficulties, and disappointments, but at base alcohol abuse is an illness, not a therapy. (Symptom #5 again: drinking heavily in response to stress.) Decades later, you’ll understand the advice for Adult Children of Alcoholics: Let go of the need to diagnose alcoholism. The family disruptions posed by alcohol abuse are real with or without the label.
When you lived with Mom, she seldom came out of her bedroom, except for work where, as a surgical nurse at a Trauma 1 Center, she saw Phoenix’s worst car and motorcycle wrecks, family abuse, gun and knife wounds, and senseless diseases and tragedies. It will be years before you realize your problems must have looked miniscule compared to her life-or-death workdays. Nonetheless, you knew she would let you come home if you asked. This despite the rift between you about what you think she should change (mostly her drinking) and what she can’t or won’t change. (Self-test: Has a family member or close friend expressed concern or complained about your drinking?)
Monday, July 16 (offense)
The next exterminator is Hector from Beta Pest Control dressed in pressed khaki on a morning when the temperature barely dips below ninety. He sprays the baseboards like the exterminator before him, but this is where the similarities end. In both the pantry and the bedroom closet, he sets the trapdoors to the attic askew.
“That’s probably where they’re coming from,” he says. “That and the air-conditioning ducts. Their favorite places to hide.” Hector contradicts what Doug from Alpha Exterminators said last month and rejects any link Doug made to the nearby irrigation canal.
Shaking an aerosol can in each hand, Hector tells you to grab your stuff and points you toward the door. (Penny is at a friend’s house.) He sets the two “bombs” and escorts you out, leaving the toxic fumes hissing behind.
Outside, Hector douses the courtyard, carport, and Bermuda grass with a cloudy liquid that stings your nose. He repeats the scheduler’s instructions: The condo must be vacant for three to four hours. The process carries a three-month guarantee.
While you sign the invoice on his clipboard, he points to Tom’s palm tree next door. Fronds, both dead-dry and green, droop over the fence into the courtyard. “Scorpions like to live in palm trees,” he says.
* * *
At the office, the receptionist asks how your cockroaches are.
In Phoenix roaches mean “sewer roaches,” which are two-plus inches long and able to fly. For all their faults, scorpions aren’t associated with disease or sewers. Nonetheless, both creatures have fossil records dating back hundreds of millions of years.
Your research shows that the pests living with you are most likely bark scorpions (Centruroides sculpturatus), a smaller climbing species. They carry the distinction of having a more lethal sting than the four-inch burrowing great hairy scorpion. You find no comfort in the stats: Between 2005 and 2015, the state of Arizona reported the highest number of scorpions stings, with about 11,000 per year. In total, about 17,000 scorpion stings are reported to Poison Control Centers across the United States each year. However, bark scorpion stings were the “leading cause of death by envenomation in Arizona between 1929 and 1948,” according to a 2017 paper in the Journal of Medical Toxicology. While the majority of scorpion stings are treated at home with ice and first aid, “scorpion contact” may have been an “underlying cause” of seven deaths reported from 1999 to 2014, according to the Medical Toxicology article. You note the lower death rate for severe reactions requiring hospitalization is due in part to improved medical interventions and an FDA-approved antivenom drug for treating scorpion stings. Nonetheless, a scorpion sting would warrant a call to your local Poison Control Center.
Back home after Hector’s visit, you feel a headache gathering as sure as a summer monsoon. The refrigerator you open for ice water is decorated with magnets for the emergency animal clinic and the Poison Control Centers 800-number. You wonder how all the insecticides are affecting your health. Which is worse? The scorpions or the chemicals meant to kill them?
Timeout/Interlude
The scorpions keep coming, and Beta Pest Control returns in late September. This invoice says Dennis used a half gallon of insecticide in the house and 35 gallons outside. Either the chemicals work or the scorpions hibernate when winter weather cools the desert. After Dennis’s visit, the only scorpions you see are dead ones.
Saturday, February 16 (defense)
Even though your friends have heard about the scorpions, they come to your party. They gather in the great room for nibbles and drinks, with some sitting in scorpion territory on the carpet.
Recently, you celebrated an orphan Thanksgiving with several of these co-workers, friends, and friends of friends. Most holidays Mom is at the hospital, exhausted from being at the hospital, or holed up in her bedroom with “migraines.” These friends are the family you choose—a choice you hoped Mom would notice. In retrospect, this choice hurt her feelings and accomplished nothing.
“Psst, psst.” A guy from the university leans around the doorjamb. He motions for you to come into the bathroom.
“I stomped a scorpion,” he says.
There’s a smear on the baseboard near the toilet. For a second you wonder if he shares your fear of even a dead scorpion’s stinger.
He returns to the party, and you use toilet paper to wipe up what had been a scorpion. Your connection to the party in the great room evaporates. The scorpions are back. You shouldn’t be surprised. This is how things happen with Mom too. Things are okay, until they aren’t.
Thursday, May 9 (defense)
A scorpion eavesdrops on the ceiling above your desk when you call the Realtor to confirm your intent to vacate. You resolve to make it through the last thirty days without getting stung. Meanwhile, you start collecting scorpions, this time in an applesauce jar.
* * *
Laundry night. You kneel on the floor, sorting clothes from the wicker hamper. Near the bottom you pull out an armload of underwear and T-shirts. A sock falls between your thighs. You reach down to retrieve it, and it moves.
You jump up to discover a scorpion clinging to your shin. You must have squealed because Penny runs in to investigate. You catch her collar as her nose closes in on your leg and the scorpion.
Hobbling toward the dog crate, you pull Penny along while keeping your endangered leg as still as possible. Penny balks, and you slam the crate door once she’s inside. You’ll make it up to her later.
Maybe you can just shake it off. You try one gentle shake, and the scorpion slides down to your instep and assumes the position—stinger curled and ready. Oh, God, you think. This is going to hurt.
You wait statue-like, a sheen of perspiration covering you, until the scorpion relaxes its tail. You hold steady until it walks off your leg and onto the carpet.
With a scream, you snag the first thing within reach (a T-shirt) and slam it down on the scorpion. Despite the concrete slab beneath the carpet, the blow only hurts your hand. The scorpion scurries onto the camouflage of the wicker hamper. You run for the pliers and pinch the scorpion, dropping it in the new collection jar, evidence to show the Realtor on check-out day.
You start packing. Like any savvy desert dweller, you never reach anywhere you can’t see. You shake out blankets, towels, and sweaters. Boxes for books and tchotchkes are sprayed with insecticide before being loaded. Scorpions alive and dead add to your jar, which is soon two-plus deep in places.
Most notable is one scorpion with three babies riding on its back. You take it to work for your boss’s daughter, who is in an entomology class at the university. You watch the scorpion family in the jar on your desk for most of the day before it is picked up. Later you hear how the parent scorpion turned violent and killed its young.
Friday, June 7 (offense)
The forecast high is 105 degrees on the day the movers arrive in a neon-colored truck. They’ll transport the heaviest furniture to your new apartment, five miles and a flight of stairs away. You’ve already moved the smaller furniture, fragile items, and Penny and her crate. As the movers tackle the dining room furniture, you warn them. “That’s why I’m moving.” Sweat runs down your temple when you point out the scorpion lurking on the vaulted ceiling.
“Whoa,” one guy mutters at your jar of scorpions on the kitchen counter.
* * *
By evening, with two friends’ Blazers, a truck, and your hatchback loaded with boxes, the condo is empty, except for cleaning supplies, the scorpion jar, and the scorpion on the ceiling. A coworker shoots a rubber band to bring down the scorpion a couple feet from where you stand. You grab your pliers and pounce on the scorpion to a chorus of groans.
The next day, Mom comes over to help you clean. She surprises you by not calling to cancel. For years plans have been scuttled, with Mom blaming migraines or something she ate, while her syrupy voice and herkie movements hint that she’s either still drunk or drinking. (Symptom #6: Have you sometimes failed to keep promises you made to yourself about controlling or cutting down on your drinking?) The last time she visited you was when you were moving in the year before.
Later, the toothy Realtor walks through the townhouse. When he sees your scorpion collection, he asks if he can show them to his son, who is waiting in their junk-filled Cadillac. He returns the jar, signs the papers, and you surrender the keys.
Sunday, June 9 (venue change)
In the new apartment, you step on a scorpion in the bathroom. You both retreat—the scorpion to the baseboard under the vanity and you to retrieve the needle-nose pliers.
You crouch down, spot your prey, and ease in with the pliers. When captured, it aims wildly with its stinger-laden tail. You lift the scorpion over the toilet and let it flush away. Is this a stowaway from the condo or…?
A year earlier, you moved out of a home full of the emotional stings of a detached alcohol-dependent parent. In comparison, living in another rental amid the threat of scorpions seems miniscule.
On the continuum of alcoholism, Mom’s problems never seemed real enough. She was functional. She usually held down a job. Once, whether she quit or was fired, she just stayed in bed and smoked while you attended school and worked. A few weeks later she dressed for an interview, went out, and got a new job. (Symptom #1: Are you having more financial, work, school, or family problems as a result of your drinking?)
Unlike alcoholic tropes in the movies, she drank quietly at home. But whiskey (and later brandy) was important to her in a way that neither you nor anything else in her life could compete.
You’re telling this story after Mom is gone (cancer). She would have withdrawn further if you had admitted writing about her while she was alive. But you would have been healthier and happier if you hadn’t doubted yourself so much. Things changed when career counseling pivoted into helping you realize Mom really was an alcoholic and that was her battle, not yours. Moving out and living your own life became something you had to do.
In recent years of teaching, several students, most in their early twenties, have confided about their parents’ addictions. In return, you share relevant bits about Mom. You tell them what you wish someone had told you: It’s not your fault. It’s not your responsibility—you’ve tried to help. And no matter what anyone says or implies, the troubles are real. You point the students toward resources and counseling. You walk them across campus to make introductions, if needed. You explain that the denials might not stop and the problems might never be fixed, but they have the right to move on with their own lives and to meet their own scorpion-level obstacles.
Melissa Olson-Petrie’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been published in Southeast Review, Blue Mesa Review, cream city review, and other print and online magazines. Her publication credits include editing technology books and writing for newspapers and university research magazines. She has taught writing and related courses at state universities in Arizona and Wisconsin.
Website: melissaolsonpetrie.com
