MICHAEL & HEATHER COLLETTO

“What was that?”  My voice was tense.  Nothing like the ease with which Mike had just flicked a shoe in the general direction of the window near our bed.

“Nothing.  Just a cockroach trying to get into our room,” he said.  His high voice and raised eyebrows struggled for all the nonchalance he could muster.

Meaning to cancel the apparent invite to the local cockroaches, I slammed the window shut.  Mike protested.  “What makes you think he won’t just try to come back through the same window to get back in?” I argued.

“What makes you think he needs an open window to get in?”

Touche.

When we returned home to the Resource Center after almost a week away, we were greeted by an army of ants marching from the door to our food cabinet and back again.  (Rest in peace, Tony the Tiger.)  There were cobwebs in my flip-flops.  An angry hornet made its way into the living room and beetles smacked up against our laptop during a movie.  Tokay gecko poop was on my pillow.  A jumping spider was perusing our toiletries, and Mike scoffed at my command that he be the one to kill it.  (My snarky comment about his God-given role as the bug-killer in the marriage quickly down-spiraled, and I ended up making dinner that night.)

At the end of the night, I walked into our dark bathroom and reached for the light, a giant moth flew in my face.  I leaped backwards and hopped up and down until I had returned to my safe location on the couch, where Mike was sitting and watching.

“It was a giant moth!” I cried.  “Huge!” I added when he looked doubtful.

Said moth flapped its way into our main room, and it was clear that the “moth” was actually a bat.  All the doors in our home were tightly shut, each with about four locks on top of the door and four on the bottom.  I was trapped.  I crawled in the tiny space between Mike’s back and the couch and prepared to grow old there, sending postcards every so often to those I loved.

As you can imagine, some yelling ensued, my lines muffled in Mike’s back.  “Get it!”  “What do you want me to do?”  “Get it outside!”  “How?”  “I don’t care!  Just do it!” etc.  The bat flew back into the bathroom, and Mike made a noble lunge for the door to trap it inside.

The rest of our conversation was strategery at its finest.  When to open the big doors for the bat to fly out of while keeping all the bugs outside from coming in?  Where did the bat come from, and how would he most appreciate receiving a return ticket?  What do you think he is doing in the bathroom?  Would he like a spare toothbrush?  And so forth.

It was decided that we would open the wide, main doors to entice the bat outside, then I would hunker behind the couch while Mike opened the bathroom door.  With all the pomp we could muster, the plan was executed.  But no bat issued forth.  After a few minutes, Mike ventured in with a flashlight.  The bathroom was empty.  Or so he said.  I decided his declaration was not confident enough, and his punishment was baby-sitting the open bathroom window (which doesn’t close) while I brushed my teeth.

That night, safely below the mosquito net, we declared our home charmingly rustic.  The laughing that ensued was probably at least partially a side effect of all the bug poison we’d been liberally spraying around the house.  We wouldn’t know–the darn warning labels were written in Thai.

Posted by: collettostories Category: Thailand, writing Tags: ants, bat, bug spray, geckos, home, mosquito net, poison, Resource Center, roach, spiders, Thailand