The queen of all wild things

Sarah's house, Yupukari, Guyana

  by Sarah Ambriz, Guyana, 2008-2011

  She comes home, happy to see her door still cracked ajar. The day before, she’d misplaced her key and kept the door open just enough so that the lock wouldn’t click. 

  “I gotta find those keys,” she says to herself.

  She half limps into the house, walking gingerly thanks to a splinter on the bottom of her foot – the result of chasing horses out of the fenced yard of the Caiman House… barefoot… in the dark. She may or may not have stepped in horse poop in the process (she didn’t check, just rubbed her feet in the grass and moved on.) 

  Her first priorities -- getting her lamps lit and finding tweezers. Her flashlight however, catches one, and then another huge cockroach loitering in the front room and kitchen. 

  It wasn’t many months ago that she feared all the moving things crawling in and around her house, or that she imagined crawled in and around her house. Not now, though. 

  At least, not usually.

Proof of life within...

  But with the second roach, she begins to feel the house slipping from her possession, as well as her perception of the static nature of things. The Invasion of Nature; action is required. 

  She starts to search for the bug-killer spray, but can’t find it. Her crank operated flashlight dims down and she goes to light one of her lanterns. As she puts the glass cover back on after lighting the wick, it slips and falls to the floor with a shattering crash. 

  She sighs and moves on.

  Further search for bug killer unearths a moving THING on a pile of clothes on the couch. A snake. Not feeling as bad ass as the LAST time a snake was in her house, she makes a few attempts to pick it up and only succeeds in getting it to crawl into a crack in the wall. 

  She’s searching, again, for spray and now the snake, and this unearths the misplaced keys - in a corner behind a door. 

  It all comes back to her – she’d thrown the keys back there in an infuriated effort to stop the maddening banter of the bats living within the walls the day before. 

  It hadn’t worked.

  One down… five to go, she tells herself, figuring light, splinter, roach #1, roach #2 and snake were the next tasks at hand. She hears a couple noises as she starts up the search anew for the snake or bug spray, whichever comes first. One sound comes from the trash can, another in the bathroom where she guessed the snake slithered off to. Picking through her trash, she finds a cricket and moves on. It’s the least of her worries. 

  The noise in the bathroom? Oh, it’s the sound of the leaking sink pipe dripping into a bucket. The leak began the day before. When she had tried to stop the leak, the entire tube broke free from the sink and she turned the pipes off, but not before a good drenching. The pipe still leaks. 

  “Gotta get someone to check the pipes out,” she tells herself.

  Along with the leak, though, the sneaking snake is, in fact, in the bathroom, shyly slithering in the open crevice behind the shower. It wasn’t reluctant to come out and she wasn’t reluctant to put her hand in, not with its mouth and fangs facing her way. She leaves the snake for a moment.

  Roach #1 re-appears, finally, and, in a flash of insight, she retraces her steps to her last insect encounter (a trail of ants on the shelves in the kitchen) and finds the spray right where she left it. 

  “Ok roach, prepare for liquidation,” she says, no qualms about execution, gas-chamber style, though she still hasn’t been able to bring herself to squash bugs yet - which would have made things much easier, she admits to herself. 

  She lines up the shot, presses the button and… nothing. She forgot that that brand new bottle she’d bought in Lethem won’t spray for some reason.

Sarah Ambriz and friend

  Pausing to crank her flashlight, she grabs a pointer broom and compromises – death by squishing… by a broom. In two or three whammies, the roach is juicing up the floor and she flicks it outside with a few twists of the wrist. She then finds the time to pluck out the splinter from her foot and sweep the broken glass into a pile before she lights her other lantern and goes to check on the snake. 

  Now, not only is the snake out of the crevice enough to grab, but cockroach #2 is right in the line of fire. She decides to go for the big potatoes (i.e. the snake. Even though she’s fascinated by them, she’ll have a harder time sleeping knowing one is silently by slithering around in her house). The snake pops back into the crevice, though, when she’s AGAIN too skittish to keep hold of it. Taking her frustrations out on roach #2 is no problem and she ferociously annihilates it and sweeps it outside. Ok, 5 down, 1 to go.

  Deciding it’s time for Defcon 5, she finds a forked branch to use on the snake and fashions a makeshift headlight out of a headband and her wind up flashlight (noting wryly she’d used the headband to construct a makeshift safety glove for the last snake she caught.) She’ll use the stick to pin down the snake behind its head to safely grasp it and the "headlight" for an easier hands-free approach at the attack. The Y of the stick too big, though, the snake retreats. 

  She waits again for an opportune moment. 

  The headlight falls off. 

  She waits again for an opportune moment. And she talks to the snake. “I’m not gonna hurt you, I just want you out of my house. YOU want to get out, I want you out. C’mon, c’mon!” The Y on the stick still too big, the snake slithers into a cupboard. Another attempt. The snake slithers into a crack in the boards.

  In chasing the snake around the house, she finds all sorts of proof of life within. Poop of many varieties, cobwebs, dead and alive spiders. 

  Hmm. 

  Finally, sleep overrides all her other supercharged senses. And though she vowed not to go to sleep until she carried that snake outside, she gives in and gives up. 

  In the beginning, she worried that being on her own in Guyana’s remote interior would be lonely, and maybe she’d get bored.

  But here, she’s never alone. Things are never still. It’s never quiet. Never predictable. Tucking her mosquito net securely in at all sides of the bed, she falls asleep, surrounded by her loyal subjects, the reluctant queen of all wild things.