Show the Nice Lady the Chiggers Hiding in Your Butt

By
Amy Vansant

My husband Mike woke up with his entire left hip and butt cheek covered in a buckshot pattern of connect-the-dots, like he’d been caught stealing away with a Hatfield’s favorite daughter.

This is as much of Mike’s butt as he will allow me to show. And it was hell talking him into this.

We’re aware that mosquitoes find Mike irresistible, but a even a CIA-trained mosquito black-ops wet team couldn’t have bit him 20 times over the course of an evening. We considered a spider with an attitude problem, maybe the brother Charlotte never told Wilbur about, but the bites didn’t have that double-fangy vampire thing. A few Google searches later, we settled on chiggers. We’d walked the dog through an unkempt field the day before, so it all made sense.

Being a calm, reasonable sort, Mike asked the most logical question; the question that would be on anyone’s mind.

“Do you think there are chiggers hiding in my butt?”

I could tell by the whites of his wild, bulging eyes that he was serious.

“We’ll let me Google that…” I said, always helpful, heading for the computer. “Let’s see…yep, says here chiggers are known to hide in the anus and then creep out at night to feed…”

“REALLY?”

I whirled in my office chair.

“NO MICHAEL CHIGGERS DON’T HIDE IN YOUR ASS!”

Mike huffed and went off to take a four hour shower, strip the bed and burn the sheets.

Luckily, I had some itching medication leftover from when I’d gotten chiggers the summer before in the same demonic field. I slathered up Mike’s tush while he chatted on the phone with his mother. See, you never really know what people are doing while they’re talking to you on the phone.

Mike’s mother Mary was due to arrive in a few hours with a friend of her’s in tow.

“My friend is a nurse!” I heard Mary squeal with happiness on the other side of the phone. “We’ll show the bites to her when we get there, she’ll know what to do!”

Mike sighed. “Mother, I am not showing your new friend my ASS.”

“Go on, Mike, show her your ass,” I mumbled, still dabbing medicine on the welts.

“Not a chance in hell, Mom,” he said, giving me the stink-eye.

And that was the end of that. Until Mike’s mother and her friend arrived, and his mother spent 15 minutes begging  him to drop his drawers for the nice lady.

 

8/11: Chigger Update: Husband has four more bites, two really big ones JUST ABOVE HIS ASS. Now I’ll NEVER convince him they aren’t living in his butt.