Something Just Jumped On My Face!

“Something just jumped on my face!” That’s what I muttered as I shot upright at about 4 am this morning. Andrea just laid there like a slug, it was her only defense (sorry, that’s an irresistible quote from the movie “A Christmas Story,” I am not trying to draw too close a comparison between my lovely wife and a slug – which by the way the Gmz classify as evil!) After a few seconds of no response from my wife, I made explicit the question I had thought my exclamation had implied, “Can you hand me a flashlight?”

 

Now this request of a middle-of-the-night flashlight was not at all new to Andrea, so I need to back up in my story a bit. Last week, shortly after going to bed, I jolted awake and requested Andrea’s flashlight not once, not twice, but three times in a row. I know what you are thinking, “why didn’t you move the flashlight to your side of the bed?” Well, I DO have a flashlight there on the end table by my head, but I wasn’t about the reach for it! After all, that is precisely where I distinctly saw a large praying mantis! October must be “praying mantis appreciation month” because they seem to be EVERYWHERE and in a strange way, we have enjoyed observing the drama of those who had moved onto our back porch. Though I never saw it, the situation reminded me of the “Meercat” animal TV show that my niece kept me updated on. On the first morning, there were two mantises (or is it manti?) and soon it was clear that we had one male and one female. By the next morning, another male had moved in; don’t ask me how any of them got in since our house is screened in quite well. Sometime in the afternoon on that second day, my faint remembrance of praying mantis trivia was confirmed – the larger female feasts upon the male after the mating process.

 

The ensuing drama unfolded over the course of about a week. Each consecutive day, more males moved onto our back porch and often times in the morning I would sweep up the spare wings and legs which were left over from the female’s lover/victim. The female was growing quite large until finally, on the morning of the 6^th day, having eaten five previous mates, it was the head of Ms. Mantis that lay on our back porch floor. The saga was over, and I promptly captured and evicted the five males who had so savagely avenged their gender-mates from previous days.

 

All that to say, somewhere during the week-long praying mantis drama, I had either dreams or hallucinations of them in our bed at night. These dreams are wonderfully enhanced by our current drug of choice: mefloquine. Now, some people take mefloquine because it’s a very effective malaria prophylaxis, but deep down most of us take it for its well- known and often joked about side effect - “vivid dreams.” At first, I was skeptical, but now, having been taking mefloquine for about three months, I definitely can’t deny that my dream-world contains full color action and adventure, at times juiced with emotional intensity (whether good or bad), and all the while deceptively REAL.

 

So, to bring these three stories together, the praying mantis fascination during the day in combination with the mefloquine side effect was causing me to gain the reputation of crying “wolf” (or “mantis”) with my sleepy wife. So, that explains why when at 4 am this morning, I mumbled “something just jumped on my face!” Andrea did little more than roll over and go back to sleep.  But, I was not convinced. Dream or no dream, the still-tingling scratches of tiny claws on my face did not let me lay back down without having a look. When I finally got Andrea’s flashlight, my case was vindicated. There, clinging to the side of our mosquito net, just above my head, was an obviously terrified bush baby. What’s a bush baby? Well, it’s like a mouse who inherited its bushy tail from a squirrel (Wikipedia it if you like). Andrea, finally believing my claim, sat up and we spent a few minutes watching the little guy run around inside our mosquito net until finally he found a way to escape, plopped onto the floor with an audible thud and disappeared. Unless that is, we hallucinated the whole thing together…hmmmm…I don’t think mefloquine is that powerful.

 

With the bush baby being nocturnal, it’s hard to locate them during the day. I wish I knew what room he had chosen to bed down in, but I don’t. So the question is: tonight when I go to bed, do I close our bedroom door to hopefully keep the bush baby out (and thus off my face!) or might that actually trap him into our room for another night of fun and games? On the other hand, if it was all a vivid hallucination, maybe I can ward off the bush babies by concentrating hard on cats or mouse traps tonight before going to bed. Hmmm…Life is an adventure…and during the malaria-ridden rainy season, it’s a rather “vivid” one.