Writer’s Digest 92nd Annual Competition Humor First-Place Winner: “For Better or For Louse”
Congratulations to Emily Hampson, first-place winner in the Humor category of the 92nd Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. Here’s her winning entry, “For Better or For Louse.”
[See the complete winner’s list]
For Better or For Louse
by Emily Hampson
Before we were married, I promised my then-future husband that I would stand by him in sickness, health, and hair loss.
“You can count on me,” I told him earnestly while we fed each other bites of Chunky Monkey ice cream from a shared spoon in bed. We were adorable once upon a time. “Except for two scenarios. If at any point our house becomes infested with bed bugs OR our kids catch lice, all bets are off. I cannot guarantee that I’ll stay. I may even flee the state.” I stared at him without apology.
“Oh, come on.” He waved me off while licking the spoon.
I gripped his arm for emphasis, halting the dairy consumption. “No, really. I’m not kidding.”
In my defense, insects, in a general sense, are not the issue—as long as they’re hunkered down in their natural habitats, buzzing over daffodils and dog shit with bafflingly similar preferences. In fact, it is with great humility that I relinquish the great outdoors to the beasties. Let them infest every last fecund forest and backyard suburban picnic, dodging house sparrows and hand slaps. Let them flock to the floodlights at the ballfield like addicts to a vice. Let them propagate in puddles and feast on decay. What I can’t handle—with any paltry speck of decorum—are bugs in my living space, confined, cornered, or contained within my toddler-hand-smeared walls. When they cross the threshold into my red-brick Georgian and venture upstairs, adhere themselves to my Posturepedic mattress or limp hair follicles, then I get crazed.
The February night I found several translucent blood-sucking pediculosis capitis crawling along my three-year-old’s scalp during bath time, my husband was at work. Conveniently. The same place he was the night our fire alarm started chirping at two a.m. AND the morning I broke my foot in the foyer AND the afternoon a trio of hornets took up residence in our master bath. I don’t blame him for the timing. At least not entirely, but I must point out that tackling emergencies in tandem is supposed to be one of the main benefits of modern coupling. That and filing a joint return.
And yet, there I was, utterly alone, kneeling on the tile floor, shampoo suds seeping down my wrists. For a brief moment after I discovered the lice, I froze. I stared at those vile creatures and contemplated abandoning my girls in four-inches of lukewarm bath water, hightailing it out the door, and sprinting until I reached Indiana. When they got cold enough, they’d eventually towel off and slip on their pjs, right? My six-year-old would figure it out. She knew the drill—how to set the toothbrush timer, sing “My Favorite Things”, and illuminate the 57 nightlights that make our house shine like a beacon in the night.
But then I beheld their naked little bodies, pink and puckered from a warm soak. My preschooler announced with glee that she’d written the number “3” with a bath crayon on the side of the tub—blissful ignorance oozed from her toothy smile, naïve to the gruesome ectoparasites sucking the blood out of her head at that very moment. Ancient maternal instinct won out and I dialed Hair Butterflies.
Don’t be fooled. This establishment is not extracting monarchs out of manes. The name of the only lice-removal salon in a twenty-mile radius is quite an affront, given its unabashed attempt to evoke serenity, but what I find more egregious is that they call themselves a salon. Nevertheless, they offer a 24-hour answering service.
The store owner peppered me with questions, predominately about price. “Did I understand that the after-hours rate in the salon was three times the standard amount?”
“Yes, fine,” I spat out. Did he not understand that I was willing to drain my checking account in order to eradicate these invaders? As with any hostage situation, I was primed to pay.
An hour later, my daughters and I were doused in peppermint oil, combed out strand by strand, and probed for nits. My six-year-old was deemed clear and soon after, I was declared “unscathed”, although I would spend the next 72 hours clawing at my scalp with the dedication a hyena devotes to a carcass. My leprous 3-year-old sat in the salon chair, happy as a rat at the county fair, clutching her iPad in one hand and a lollipop in the other, oblivious to why her head was covered in a goop and tied down in a shower cap. When we returned home after 10 pm, I sanitized the bedsheets in scalding water, vacuumed the carpets, and banished an army of stuffed animals and dolls to the freezer. Three days later, I would discover there is nothing creepier than a pair of frost-bitten plastic eyeballs peeking out through a Ziploc bag beside a Home Run Inn Pizza.
That incident alone went above and beyond my Chunky Monkey marriage vows. I’d assumed I had paid my dues. That is until two months later, I woke up already scratching. As I rolled up my pajama pants, my breathing sputtered into something resembling birthing-class Lamaze. Bitemarks. Tracking down my entire leg. Could it be? NO. Not a chance. I had just returned from Europe, but I’d been careful. Neurotic even. Inspecting every hotel mattress pad, scouring luggage racks, and quarantining my suitcase in the basement to unpack.
With a primal scream worthy of a low-budget horror film, I tore off the bedding, hurling the mattress from the box spring like an adrenaline-seized parent lifting up the back of a Subaru. I carted in extra lamps and instructed my girls to stand on chairs and aim their flashlights. Nothing. Not one blood smear, molted exoskeleton, or scrap of bug-sized fecal matter to be found.
I texted my husband at work, convinced that I must’ve contracted the bites abroad, sighing with relief that our house was still a safe haven. But then, those seductive little dots appeared on my phone only to vanish. And reappear. Again. And again.
His reply finally illuminated my screen: I hate to tell you this. I was going to wait until I got home, but I have them too.
I tried to unsee the words. To flip my phone over and revert back to flirting with those traitorous dots, but there was no denying what this meant. The invaders were in our abode.
I threw jackets on the kids and we fled the contaminated epicenter for the sanctity of Target. When my husband returned home, the two of us attacked the master bedroom, vacuuming nightstands and ceiling fans and closet corners. An hour later, sweating and spent, we collapsed onto the bare mattress without a single insect in sight. At long last, my husband shot up like a resurrected corpse and exclaimed, “It must be the couch!”
We violated that sofa, probing through its thick microfiber folds with such intensity that it bordered on grotesque. Finally, we assessed our haul: two mismatched baby socks, one filthy penny, six popcorn kernels, half of a rock-hard granola bar, a purple beaded necklace, and several plastic Shopkins, likely suffering from dust-induced asthma.
“We need to call in the dogs,” I declared. “I read online you can hire these specially trained beagles and they sniff out the bed bugs.”
“That’s ridiculous,” my husband said, eyes already rolling. “How many hundreds of dollars do they want for that racket?”
“$350, but I’d pay twice that. I refuse to be that family: the outcasts, the pariahs, branded with a scarlet ‘A’. Our friends will never want to visit. Our children will be ostracized. Not to mention, I have no idea how I’m going to sleep tonight, exposed like that goat in Jurassic Park—the one with the rope draped around its neck in the T. Rex enclosure, bleating before the predator rips into its succulent calf.”
My husband furrowed his brow. “Are we talking about you or the goat?”
“We’re one and the same!” I bellowed. “I warned you about this before we were married.”
“I thought you were being hyperbolic.”
And then I exhibited one of my finer moments of adulthood and shouted back, “Do you even know me at all?!”
In the end, we got the beagle and an exterminator because you don’t skimp on ransom payments. Neither found any evidence of bed bugs, but the pest guy discovered several spider egg sacs attached to the underbelly of our ancient couch. After vomiting in my mouth, I wrote the check and exiled the sofa. Within a day, the adulterated albatross was tossed, and to my husband’s delight, we spent Master’s Tournament weekend shopping for replacement furniture.
All in all, our marriage has withstood and prevailed. We have a new sofa that doesn’t eat people, and I didn’t leave. I stayed. I haven’t spoon-fed him ice cream since we said “I do”, but I didn’t move to Indiana. And to me, that’s pretty darn romantic.