Betty & the Tremendous Leach

Flower child Betty Roots finds it hard to love absolutely all of Mother Nature's creatures when she awakes to find a giant leech on her doorstep.

“Betty & The Tremendous Leech”

 

Betty Roots awoke one dewy June morning to find that a giant leech had crawled up to her doorstep, trapping her in her Front Street apartment. Her name wasn’t really “Betty Roots”, it was actually Jessica Schwimmer, but she felt that didn’t suit the granola, earth-child persona she had fashioned for herself over the years, so she took on her pseudonym late in high school and it just stuck.

         She had recently moved back to Ohio after ending a two-year relationship with her boyfriend, AJ Rudolph. After high school, the to of them had moved to North Carolina where they had both attended the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. After her first year of college, with a number of student loans and AJ’s infidelities weighing on her, she decided to leave both college and her partner behind and return home for a while to regroup.

         The leech—a massive, amorphous blob resembling a squirming bruise, lying on her front stoop—made her miss AJ a little. Although he was an unfaithful drunk with a gambling problem, he had been useful in crises such as this. Betty loved all of Mother Nature’s creatures (or at least she claimed to) but a delicate sunflower like her couldn’t work up the nerve to remedy this problem. So she picked up the phone and called the only man she knew who still lived in that town.

         “George, it’s Betty, I need a favor.”

         “… Hmm?” George Rhiner didn’t wake up until noon or one o’clock on most summer mornings, so this 9:00 AM phone call had caught him off guard.

         “I need you to come down here and move a giant leech off my front step, or else I can’t go to work.”

George was quiet for a moment, processing the request as well as his groggy mind could.

         “A ‘giant leech’… Did I hear that correctly? You have a ‘giant leech’ on your front step and you want me to come down there and move it for you?”

         “Yes! Please, please, please! If I miss work my second week there it’s not gonna look good on me.”

         “… F**k no!” George Rhiner had an intense phobia of worms and anything that resembled a worm—such as a leech. This also included caterpillars, snakes, slugs, snails, and eels. “Just use the back door.”

         “I can’t! The neighbors have so much s**t piled up out back that I can’t open the door enough to get through!”

         “Well, sorry, tough luck, I guess.”

         “You’re seriously not gonna help me?”

         “Nope. I’m going back to bed; it’s nine in the f*****g morning.”

         “… I hate you.” Betty muttered, tarnishing her loving hippy image, though it didn’t matter, as George had already hung up.

         Eventually, Betty Roots decided to crawl out the kitchen window and hope the leech on her doorstep would be gone by the time she came back.

 

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