Herring

Quite unfortunate, the thing about centipedes.

I mean, every time I see one and provided that it has not crept up in a really surprising way like that time a really big one walked across my arm while I was on a bus, my killer instincts would go on overdrive and I would always find a way to have a sharp object on hand faster than you can say "Bob" and I'd just start chopping the little thing up.

I know what centipedes are capable of.

When I was nine, I was roused from sleep by an agonizing pain in my hand. I knew a centipede was the culprit as I saw it dashing about the blankets probably figuring out that I had woken up and might be starving for revenge. The pain was so terrible that I had to knock at my parent's room. I remember knocking softly and trying to stifle my sobs so I wouldn't wake up anyone else. I remember my mother putting some kind of ointment on the bite wound and singing me to sleep. I remember spending the night in their room. I remember the pain.

Still, I don't always feel like it's fair to invoke death penalty on a possibly innocent centipede that just happened to pass by at the wrong place and the wrong time simply because we have found it guilty by association. If a harsh judgment is handed out even before any fault is done, where then, is the justice in that?

Then I think about how terrible the justice system already is for us people, and that is when I realize that centipedes never really had a chance.

Quite unfortunate, the thing about centipedes.