Further epics of horror from Kenya…

   Let’s talk Solifuges. Or Solifugids. Solifugae? Curses! This lust for accuracy is a real thistle in the corn pipe, goddammit. Anyhow, solifuges – I’ll stick with that one – had come up in dinner conversation. Allan Morton, the chief of staff, and Tom the knuckle-sucking teaching assistant, were trading bug stories from last year. I perked up over their scorpion yarns as they are the champagne of arthropods in my book. They had been a preferred prize in my desert forays as a lad in Arizona; something to bring home in a pail and give my mother a seizure. They came as big as your hand in the American Southwest, chockfull of charisma too, and I’d been keeping myself pretty for when I met some of their quarter-pint African kin. When the faculty boys started in on solifuges we were all clueless as to what those might be. The vets described them as neither spiders nor scorpions but rather scorpion-clawed spiders. That sure sounded fucked up and the spidery half of the descriptive voided my urge to see one. It is silly that a man who finds scorpions as so neato and whoo-hoo can approach psychological collapse at the mere idea of spiders. It has nothing to do with morphology; scorpions are as mean-looking as predators come but if you were to put one of those tiny, teddy bear jumping spiders within a foot of my face you could irrigate a car battery with my lip sweat and charge it via the tension in my neck. It’s all about spirit: scorpions just go about their naturally ordained functions; spiders are densely tangled knots of iniquity, neutron clusters of evil stuffed in a bug shell. Even scorpion pincers couldn’t make solifuges sound more enticing; it only suggested that they were compound abominations. Frankenstein spiders. Just had to hope there weren’t any scheduled to scuttle into my future.

   In the rearview it’s plain to see how solifuges were the Devil’s sick marionettes juiced on electromagnetic evil. I hadn’t seen any of these mutato bugs yet, not even in the night-stroked sands of South Horr. Then again they’d never come up in chit chat or even the lectures, though I’m ill-qualified to report on the latter. But almost as soon as folks started dishing rumors about them they commenced their infiltration on our village. It was less than an hour after the initial solifuge discourse, while still slapping arachnophantasms off my arms and nicotine-washing the willies out of my nerves, when I spotted the first one. It wasn’t part of my paranoia – it was too distinct and scratched its palps too fucking loudly on the concrete of the open air dinner banda. I coughed the butt out of my face, leaping up to scatter my chair and the people sitting too close to me.

   “That has got to be a fucking solifuge” I howled trying to distance myself without tripping over anything I’d just knocked over.

   The kids at my end of the table saw the fist-sized atrocity quickly enough, launching into a crazy riot which helped beard my own chickenshittery. They shrieked and collided as it turned in place with an abhorrent “khickk khickk khickk” on the cement. It wanted out as much as we did and chose to tear off at Vic to escape. He was the largest creature on the patio but with a mere two legs he must have seemed a safer bet than the stampeding bipeds near me. Still it was a doomed decision as the big boy took a step aside and brought a sneaker down on it as it whizzed by.

   So now we had a solifuge to study. I can’t be sure that my first impression, a spidery thing with three or four inches of body propelled by legs of a similar measure, was correct. We did know that it was squishable to the dimensions of the fore sole of Vic’s tennis shoe and that’s still a substantial bug. It was an ugly mess of gray abdomen, ruddy cephalothorax and waxy yellow legwork. A sump of arachnid snot like crème brûlée with blue and purple streaks. Betty fuck a bunny, I was not going to sleep for days.

   Later on I wanted some distance from the nightmares Kenya was trying to crack open in my head. Reading in bed was a happy idea. I’d broken into Steven Weinberg’s Dreams of a Final Theory and was enjoying an off-ramp into a layman’s scenic overlook of theoretical physics. We have kerosene, paraffin in the colonial tongue, lamps for light and naturally they bring in the bugs. When resting from a thousand laps around the flame, insects alight on shelves, rafters, or the mosquito nets draping the beds. My pillow lies opposite the lamp so I rest a flashlight on a shoulder to get me brightly through some pages before dozing. This draws them in closer and before you know it there’s a bustling arthropod convention with the heaviest floor traffic right by my head. They are on the outside and as long as I don’t train my eyes on the peripheral hubbub I’m left with a scuttling galaxy of freckles. A visual lullaby – sweet, soothing, whirling blemishes. Tonight a big henna fuzz ascended in the far quadrant of my right eye. A large blurry bug hovering to make sure I was getting sleepy, to tell me reading in such poor light was bad for my little eyes. That was nice. I turned to thank it and thought it was funny that its presence wasn’t obscured like the other insects with all that skeeter gauze ghosting up their forms.

   Because, you see, it wasn’t looking out for my best interests among the gentle cyclone of bugs outside the net. It was inside my fucking net and it was a fucking solifuge that must have chewed through the goddamn fabric because it was suddenly at my face and coming to eat my fucking eye!

   The wretched critter, eighteen times as nasty as the hairiest spider and so full of ugly it could melt children, blazed to the top of my net making small pops as it screeched past the sound barrier. I was out of the mesh before that miserable scab of agony moved two legs but looked at it long enough to describe it in exacting detail forty fucking years from now. Those infernal spider resemblers must have been engineered for horrible forms of biopsychological warfare by evil animae back in a day when beings really hated the hell out of each other. Why o why won’t history’s combatants ever clean up after themselves? Landmines still blow the limbs off Laotian ladies in rice paddies and solifuges now hunt for my organs.

   The beast at the top of my worthless canopy loitered as I put a big twist in the netting to keep it inside. Vic came to my aid; having already murdered one a blood feud was on – this solifuge might have mistaken me for him. Gloving his hand with a squishing sock he lunged and mashed the little bastard good. That sickly crunch again, the same sonic vomit squeezed under Vic’s sneaker a couple hours back. But when he pulled his hand back we found no bug goop on the sock and absolutely no corpse in the net. It had vanished, affirming that the critter was equipped with powers channeled from the guts of Hell itself. We knew what had to be done now. The only way to stop vermin charged with evil magic is to tear apart everything it had been near; to flip, thrash and beat the shit out of the furnishings until Lorenzo wakes up cursing in three broken languages and the girls in the next hut start giggling at you. You have to keep at it until either the cobra under the bed bites you or you find the satanic arachnid crushed up and dead. Neither of which happened.

   As the dust settled to mud on my sweaty flesh we saw the solifuge jerk swinging over the shambles in the very spot where Vic first took a swipe at it. It was smiling. Maybe even laughing, but I couldn’t hear because Enzo was calling us pig-faggot babies in his now intolerable Spic-Dago idioma. That mean greaser creep doesn’t use a mosquito net yet never gets bit. Which says something about how desirable he is to other living things. Passing up such an easy mark made it clear the solifuge had an axe to grind with me for abetting in the killing of its cousin, with Vic next on the vendetta. Hopefully Enzo will be devoured by dick-eating plants out here. I wanted to take the arachnid alive and tuck it up his fanny but reality doesn’t see me handling spiders or Lorenzo’s poop chute.

   We launched back to the kill in a fury of flying socks and annihilated the monster. Or at least we crushed the hideous shell of the pernicious spirit and tossed the mangled body out of the banda. Its physical residue was no longer with us but the emetic crunching noise of that diabolical varmint’s death will be with me forever.

   The awful fracas was over. My netting has been re-inspected a dozen times and tucked tightly beneath my mattress. I was committed to bug-eyed sentry duty, clicking away endless seconds thinking I’d be awake forever. But the vigilance collapsed quickly. After I noted the episode in the log book my adrenaline petered out, followed quickly by consciousness. Lulled to sleep as Enzo snored out Latino derision I slept soundly without dreams or urine breaks.