My close encounter of the painful kind:

I froze and remembered the television show “1000 ways to die!”

I had just stepped out of the shower toweling myself dry naked as the day I was born my only item of modesty a pair of Bata slippers. I don’t know who was more shocked to see the other me or that thing as we stopped and eyeballed each other. I was considerably taller so I was looking down at this………..this thing that had crawled out from under something in my bedroom while it looked up at me unblinking in its steely gaze.

What to do now! In a state of nudity, very many things cross your mind when confronted by something staring at your nakedness and seemingly completely unfazed by what it sees. In my confusion I sidestepped and it did the same no one neither advancing nor retreating as would be expected when in a confrontation with something.

Then recognizing the advantage of my size and in a bid to finish this confrontation before it started I raised my leg in a bid to kick/squish/splatter the thing. It was however smarter than I had given it credit for and it easily sidestepped away from me with ninja fast reflexes. It was now going to get me for sure. More out of desperation and annoyance – in hindsight a bad combination when you are trying to aim a killer blow at something while in a total state of undress – then good tactics and planning, I struck out with everything that I had before my advantage was lost.

But my best wasn’t good enough as I tracked a zigzagged pattern all over the battle ground determined to crush this thing that had invaded my personal space, its lightning fast reflexes no match for my clumsy and feeble attempts to put my pair of Bata slippers to good use. Finally a crash, had I succeeded, before it was immediately followed by an excruciating pain on one of my toes which had in my impatient stampede across the room had in my zest and zeal inexplicably collided head on with a hard and immovable object, the dressing table stool in the bedroom!

Now what, I thought as I hopped around the room my nakedness forgotten, pain jangling on my every nerve wondering why I had brought pain and suffering to myself for trying to dispatch an intruder to the next life. The thing had surely got me and got me good but I would live to fight another day thoroughly chastised and beaten but wiser nonetheless!

And that my friends (with apologies to my niece whom I had used as an excuse too embarrassed to admit to my colleagues about my misadventure) is how I ended up limping for the better part of two days, wearing a pair of crocs with a painfully hurting and bandaged toe (and not the big toe but its immediate neighbor) all in my misguided attempts to stomp on the biggest cockroach I had ever seen in my life and failing miserably.

I tell you this thing was huge, the stuff of nightmares and probably a relative of one of those ginormous Madagascar hissing cockroaches and my encounter with it and the ensuing comical effort to annihilate it reminded me of those scenes on “1000 ways to Die” that we watch and laugh at how easy it is for one to dispatch himself to the next life in an overzealous act of plain stupidity or false bravado. In my case a near broken and painful toe was the souvenir that I took away but what if I had slipped during my war dance and hit my head on the corner of the dressing table then we would be talking of another matter altogether, as in death by cockroach!!

I plan to give that creature a wide berth the next time we encounter each other lest the outcome become more serious than it was memories of out last dual fresh in my mind….if I see it that is since I have not laid eyes on it in the intervening period!