A centipede, take two

I was going to wash some clothes but I had dumped things in the laundry sink that required clearing up. So I cleared up and unplugged the sink. Out of the drain crawled a big centipede. I stood in a state of near shock. This is the ninth floor! How can a centipede reach me? I have a terrace that serves as a garden. There are no centipedes there. What is it doing in the laundry sink?

My right middle toe tingles as it remembers. Forty-four years ago when my youngest daughter was five months old we lived in Merville, then a small, scattered community with no more than 50 houses. It was full of wild things — snakes, snails and centipedes. I was a young housewife who always took personal care of my babies. My youngest daughter’s crib was in our room and when she woke up in the middle of the night I would get up, pad in my bare feet to her crib at the foot of our bed to change her diapers, feed her and put her back to sleep.

Usually I didn’t wear my slippers. I had stopped wearing slippers as a form of rebellion against what we called The Establishment. It was 1966. The hippie movement was stirring, just starting. Anyway I went over to change her diaper when I felt the most painful sting on my right third toe. It was so terribly painful I cried out loud. My husband woke up. He said it was a centipede but he couldn’t catch it. It was, after all, 2 a.m. and I liked to mother in the dark. After the baby slept I limped towards the encyclopedia — no personal computers then — and looked up centipede. It implied I could be dead by morning.

But early the next day I was still miraculously alive. We went to the clinic of Dr. Victor Potenciano, whom I called Tito Titong. Now there’s a big hospital on EDSA named after him. He gave me an injection, an antidote to the poison, and told me, “Next time wear your slippers and don’t die.”

Maybe a year passed. Our three little girls were now in the room right next to ours. They were afflicted with a virus that made all three of them barf all over their beds, all over their yayas and all over me, while their father either went to office, played golf or lay in bed reading. When they got well enough to stop barfing I decided to ease my heart by making pancit molo from scratch. I even made the wonton wrapper myself.

I opened a cabinet and down fell a huge centipede. I screamed. My husband burst into the kitchen, looked at the centipede and got extremely excited. He ran to get his lighter fluid, poured it over the huge centipede and lit a match. It started a small conflagration on the kitchen counter that horrified everybody except him. The centipede was burnt to a crisp.

All these memories came rushing back when that centipede crawled out of my ninth floor drain. It was going to die, I decided. I was going to kill it. I picked up a can of insect spray and sprayed it directly until I saw how dizzy it became. Than bam! I hit it several times with my slipper. It died, broken into separate pieces, which might come to life again, I thought, as I washed it down the drain. Then just to play safe I covered the drain with a dipper full of water so nothing could come through easily.

Something strange is happening. I can sense it. Lately I’ve noticed something like an epidemic of dead cockroaches in the mornings. I open my bedroom door, there’s one nearby, another under my kitchen stool, two of them lying on their backs, dead. I wonder — where are they all coming from and why do they seem more now than last year? Suddenly, a centipede crawls out of my laundry drain. All these creatures of the ground seem to be scaling up pipes to surface on the ninth floor?

Then I remember that similar things had happened before the last big earthquake. Maybe one of these days, when we least expect it, an earthquake will come and shake us up again, another strong one. Maybe, this time, God whispered into the ear of a centipede and instructed her to scare the life out of me to prepare me for a coming earthquake.

“Will I die?” the poor centipede must have asked, trembling.

Of course, He must have said, but she is Filipina. She is worth dying for.