The girl who cried centipede

Once upon a time there was a little girl who did not share her mother's profound fear of mostly-harmless creatures. The girl and her mother lived in a peaceful hamlet, surrounded by green fields of real and imaginary fauna.

Nemesis centipede, a cousin of the Minotaur.

One day the girl and her mother were tending an invisible flock of crickets in the kitchen, when a ginormous centipede came out of nowhere and made a beeline for the mother's juicy ankles.

The quick-witted girl raised the alarm, whereupon her mother morphed into a giant shrieking chicken and climbed barefoot into the safety of the kitchen sink. Eventually the chicken-mother regained her humanity and offered the centipede a tupperware transport to the outside realm.

All returned to normal in the peaceful hamlet, except for one minor irritating detail. The girl, having apparently found this episode very amusing, took it upon herself to taunt her mother with cries of "CENTIPEDE ALARM!" every time the poor matron-in-distress tried to enter the kitchen to access her coffee supply.

The first dozen alarms sent the gullible mother running for the shelter of the sink, but eventually she learned to ignore her child's bug alarms. The bug alarms persist to this day like Old Faithful, in spite of the mother's consistent efforts to read to her child every night and securely hold her hand at all street crossings.

With such rampant abuses of the bug alarm system, the mother knows that it's only a matter of time till she meets her nemesis face to ankle. One day soon, the centipede will come marching again into the kitchen on his hundred nasty legs, thirsting for revenge, wielding nunchucks and dripping poison from his five-inch fangs.

On that fateful day of the centipede, the girl will raise the bug alarm, and the mother will take no notice. Then one of them will take it right in the ankle.

Till then, all is quiet in the peaceful hamlet where - thanks be to goodness - at least there are no wolves.