The Soft Miracle in the Quiet House
By Christopher Sopher
Valley of the Sun Press – Good Life Column
November 20, 2025
Today started like nothing special. A cool desert morning, the kind Phoenix gives you as a gift when it feels like being kind. The air drifted in at sixty-nine degrees, soft enough to turn off every fan in the house. For once, the place was quiet — the kind of quiet you can feel in your bones.
Daisy was asleep on my lap, snoring like some kind of tiny freight train with a flat tire. The breeze slipped through the doorway, carrying that leftover smell after a light rain. It was one of those simple, perfect moments — the ones you never plan, but you feel grateful for.
And then I saw it.
A big, brown scorpion.
Sitting on the floor like it owned the damn place.
Not moving fast. Just there.
Enough to snap me out of my calm, but not enough to panic me. I’ve lived in Phoenix long enough to know the rules: you don’t freak out, you just handle it.
But Daisy?
If she saw that thing, she’d go from “sleeping baby angel” to “tiny Viking warrior.”
So I eased her off my lap, pointed her away from the danger, and tucked her into her crate like I was putting away the world’s angriest toddler.
Now it was just me and the scorpion.
Here’s the part nobody ever gets: I don’t like killing anything.
Not spiders.
Not bugs.
Not even scorpions.
Not out of fear — out of respect.
Out of karma.
Out of something in me that refuses to squash anything that’s just trying to survive the same planet I’m stuck on.
So there I was, trying to save both of us:
me, Daisy, and the scorpion.
I grabbed the cardboard tube from the last roll of paper towels, held a plastic cup in the other hand, and started negotiating like a hostage situation. The scorpion lifted its tail — the “I see you, bro” stance — and then backed into the tube.
Perfect.
Cup on the other end.
He dropped right in.
Angry.
Spinning.
Alive.
Good enough.
I walked him outside to the wash behind my house — desert on the other side of the fence — and released him back into the land he understood better than I ever will.
Who knows if he’ll come back.
Who knows if he’ll tell his friends.
But I couldn’t bring myself to kill him.
And weirdly, that was the best moment of my day.
Not because it was dramatic.
Not because it was dangerous.
But because it reminded me that even in the smallest, strangest moments — a quiet house, a sleeping pug, a scorpion invading the morning — you can choose how you want to show up in this world.
Today, I chose mercy.
For a creature most people would crush without thinking twice.
Sometimes the miracle isn’t what visits you.
It’s how you respond.
