My Wife’s Death-Dealing Slippers

First off, I don’t at all mean to imply anything about the smell of my wife’s slippers. Don’t think for a second I’d stoop to implying, even in jest, that Carolyn’s slippers are so stinky they could kill you. I wouldn’t dare hint at such a thing—even if the shoe fit—which, I repeat, I am not saying.

No, I’m talking about my wife taking her slippers off and then using them to rain down destruction upon a host of noxious insects, arachnids, and, in one case, a venomous reptile.

My own weapon of choice is usually a fly swatter. I’ll see a tarantula-sized spider in our bedroom, go for a swatter, and by the time I get back, Carolyn’s already cleaning the gruesome goo off the bottom of her slipper with a Kleenex. It strikes me as ironic that her foot gear is so handy.

Despite many failures, I still insist on using a swatter to try to terminate the frequent intruding wasps in our house. They’ll be crawling on a window screen, and I’ll give them the full benefit of my tremendous arm strength and wrist-snap torque (I used to play tennis!) and then the wasps will rocket-bounce off the screen so fast and so far that I can’t find them for minutes. When I do locate them, they’re always still alive and crawling, so I swat them 5 or 6 more times, bouncing them up off the carpet each time until Carolyn finally steps in and ends my dramatic but futile attempts with one fatally effective squash-and-grind with her slipper. In case that’s ambiguous, she does this to the wasp, not to me. Though I know there are days … she probably considers it.

Now for the bushmaster. Despite what it might sound like, a bushmaster is not a brand of heavy-duty weed eater, nor is it a porn star’s on-screen name—at least as far as I know. Carolyn was stationed, during Peace Corps service, in Brazil in the town of Cuiaba, which was surrounded by swamp and jungle. One day, inside her villa she spied, in a potted plant, the bushmaster—a large, venomous snake, which was in fact the deadliest serpent in the region—glaring back at her. Did Carolyn turn on her heels, run outside, and slam the door like any God-fearing person would do? No. Did she go in search of a hoe or a shovel or a machete or a gun, like most snake attackers would do? No. Instead, she stood her ground, slowly took off her flip-flop, somehow executed a quick maneuver that I can’t begin to imagine anyone would ever even contemplate, used that small strip of thin foam rubber sandal to pin down the bushmaster’s head, and then initiated mortal combat. I’m not going to say directly which contestant won the struggle, but Carolyn walked away from it—and the bushmaster did not.

My wife’s an interesting woman. Sometimes she’s a pacifist, and sometimes she’s a scarily efficient wildlife assassin. I guess you could say, depending on the circumstances—she flip-flops.

(My thanks to Wildacres Retreat, where this essay was written.)