Toasted Centipede

I awoke at 2:04 am to an odd crinkling sound and the stench of burning rubber and the smoke alarm stuttering. I wasn’t at all sure what to do. Call the fire department? Instead, I got the fire extinguisher in the kitchen and pulled the pin— but I didn’t use it. Eventually it became clear that the burning was coming from the thermostat. The crinkling noise finally stopped.

It was a centipede that shorted the wiring. This was discovered much later— I slept with the fire extinguisher at my side. Steve, the technician who discovered it, asked me if he could have the thermostat because he wanted to show it around, what with the centipede, toasted but still in one piece, nestled inside.

Like the thermostat, the centipede appeared to be dead. It wasn’t. This news was delivered later that morning with great excitement by Steve, who also said: ‘The head was fried but it was wagging its tail.’

‘This thing was about this long.’ He spread his hands apart. ‘About a foot.’ And then he added, darkly or with real brio, I couldn’t tell: ‘They say they travel in pairs.’

By that afternoon, the back half of my thermostat, the interesting part, was placed on a desk in the shop to await a supervisor so he too could get a look. But he never did. The centipede, toasted but still alive after all, disappeared.

‘The guys think it’s in somebody’s keyboard,’ Steve said.

#centipedes #thermostat