I've been screaming (quietly, it's late here and I try to be considerate) for the past few minutes, so I've decided to sit down and write about why.

Do you know what a house centipede is? No? Count yourself lucky, because it's absolutely disgusting and my roommates and I have been coexisting with one for the past week or so.

(Until now, because it finally came out of wherever it was hiding and I smashed it with a bright pink flip flop. I regret nothing.)

House centipedes, like normal centipedes, have more legs than an insect could possibly need; a staggering 15 pairs with, for adult females, the last pair being twice the length of the body. A rough estimate of the size of these creatures is from 3 to 4 inches, if you take the legs into count. It's also incredibly fast, the Usain Bolt of centipedes, and the first time I saw it my roommates and I screamed bloody murder as this massive, leggy brown thing blitzed over our floor. It was so fast that we didn't get a good look at it at first, and after the first sighting we half believed we were seeing things. (We weren't.) As I sat down to research these small monstrosities after my harrowing last encounter with one, I discovered that house centipedes have been known to reach speeds of 16 inches per second.

16 inches per second. Small wonder we doubted our eyes when it sprinted across our room at first, it would have been little more than a disturbing brown blur.

To their credit, house centipedes are actually pretty useful for pest control. They eat cockroaches, ants, termites, and smaller spiders, so I guess we've had our recently-deceased house centipede to thank for the lack of small insects. Though, honestly, I'd rather our room was 100% bug-free.

What amused me and grossed me out in equal parts was that apparently, these insects hunt their prey by "lassoing" them: or, in other words, they jump onto their prey and use their legs to capture and eat them. They're also kept as pets by some people in Japan, who view them as "good" bugs since they hunt other household pests like cockroaches and termites. Useful they may be, but you couldn't ever pay me to keep one as a companion.

My heart rate is finally back to normal after that rather traumatizing encounter with the house centipede. I only wish for two things at this point: one, that the one I killed wasn't a mother and that there won't be any baby centipedes waiting to get revenge, and two, that we won't suddenly see an increase in cockroaches and spiders.