Aahhh, Real Monsters

Hola mi amigas,

Today's story is about MONSTERS.  It's a about a battle between the glittery good and fucking evil.  This is a story that will haunt your mind for weeks after reading it.  

Are you ready?  

You guys, this is a story about SPRICKETS!

...You know what a spricket is right?  A spricket is a terrible combination of a grasshopper and a spider.  I'm not sure that's technically correct, but that doesn't matter.  What matters is that they are horrifying.  Usually, I don't mind crickets and I'm not a fan of spiders. But imagine a spider that can freaking jump to great lengths and bite you! Whoa.

So grab your teddy bear and get prepared for the the tale of...

Aahhh, Real Monsters

In the summer between my junior and senior years of college, I elected to live in an apartment with one of my friends.  We'll call her Ria.  Ria was only a year older than me and throughout college she had easily become my favorite partner in crime.  Basically we did two things when we got together: we got drunk and then we had the best heart to hearts known to man.  I'm not really sure why, but these heart to hearts always resulted in a lot of judging from our friends.  They also resulted in a ton of stupid ideas that no one was kind enough to stop us from testing out.

Luckily, living together was not one of those ideas.  Ria had a super sweet two bedroom apartment. She owned the bigger room and had her own half bathroom.  I got the smaller room and for the most part, the main bathroom was my territory.  Ria only ever entered it to use the shower.  We're both girly-girls from our petal pink toenails to our bedazzled headbands, so having personal dressing stations suited us perfectly.

One night, Ria came home to find me sitting on our couch, wrapped in my towel and chugging a Natty Light (classy, right?). "What's wrong?" she asked as she dropped her purse and rushed to my side.  "There's a monster spider in my bathroom!" I shrieked. "It jumps. It jumps really fucking high." Ria waited a moment, before tightening her jaw and looking me dead in the eye. "Spricket." 

Up until that point, I'd lived a charmed, spricket-free existence.  After Ria explained sprickets to me, she took a shot of tequila, grabbed a broom and headed to my bathroom.  I wish I could lie and tell you that I grabbed the fly swatter and joined Ria, but I didn't.  I hid behind my door frame and watched her like the scared chicklet that I am.

Ria cautiously turned the doorknob and cracked open the bathroom door. She nudged it open with her shoe.  I'd left the light on and as Ria peered inside she declared that there was no spricket. Bullshit!  But when I came out from behind my door frame and attempted to show her the spricket, I was embarrassed to admit that my spricket was gone. Friends, I felt like a five year old who had just made her mom check under the bed for the Boogey Man. Humiliated but determined to save face, I took a shower (as quickly as I could; I knew that fucker had to be hiding somewhere) and called it a night.

The next evening I came home to find Ria standing outside of my bathroom in her towel.  She was looking straight into the room and as I walked up to her, I could see the spricket perched on the bathroom rug.  "I told you so," I whispered to her. She reached into the bathroom and turned on the light. Surprisingly the spricket was even creepier once we could see it in detail! We screamed like five year olds and slammed the bathroom door before running to the security of the couch.

Half an hour and a glass or two of wine later, we were ready to deal with the spricket, which we had now named George. I was armed with a broom and a dustpan, Ria had a dictionary and a knife (I'm serious. I don't know how we survived a whole summer together once you consider our combined brainpower).  We closed the doors to our rooms and stood on either side of the bathroom.  George would have no escape.

I turned the doorknob and kicked the door open.  Ria and I rushed to enter the room and kill George, but just like the night before, he was gone!  After searching the bathroom with utmost care, George was still MIA.  Ria and I both took showers with the bathroom door wide open that night...In case George jumped in and we needed to run out.

In fact, we took every shower that week with the door open.  I spent the week peeing with the door open.  It was a little bit ridiculous.  What we surmised was that George didn't like the bathroom light and so whenever we left it on, he went into hiding.  As you might guess, we didn't turn off the light for days.  


About a week into out standoff with George, I came home to find Ria lining up bottles of household cleaners on the counter top.  As soon as I walked through the door she handed me two, grabbed two for herself, and said it was time to say goodbye to George. We sealed off the hallway and positioned ourselves outside of the bathroom, aimed our spray bottles like guns (I imagined we were the Boondock Saints), and kicked the door open.


I turned on the light and there was George...in the middle of the floor, unaware of his fate. "GET HIM!" Ria yelled.  We began blindly spraying 409, Windex, Lysol, and Green Works.  We must have hit George because he got angry and jumped out of the bathroom and into the hallway. Ria was backed into a corner and honestly, for a minute, I thought she was going to cry.  But she just kept spraying and George the fucking spricket KEPT JUMPING. After about three minutes of non-stop spraying (and terrified squealing) on our part and freaky jumping on George's, George jumped back into the bathroom.


Exhausted, we closed the bathroom door and gave up.  If George could survive the volley of chemical warfare we had just dispensed, we figured he was here to stay.  Annoyed, Ria and I went to bed.  


The next morning I woke up and - out of curiosity - entered the bathroom.  Floating in the toilet was George.  I screamed my victory cry and woke Ria, who had a totally different response: she wanted to pray for his soul.  Friends, I cannot make this shit up.  So we did. We prayed for the spricket named George.  And then we flushed him away.

Fin

Today's Point: Today's story is worth two points; 1. Don't live in spricket infested lands. 2. You've got to learn the enemy's game before you can take him down.