This is when a lightning strike of fury shocked my low-hanging cloud of empty (I've been chaperoning this crappy cloud around for a month. My ex kindly left it behind for me when he moved out.) It was as if that cockroach shot me with a teeny arrow from his mite-sized bow - and it sliced me like a steel paper cut to the heart. How dare this obnoxious roach saunter back to the exact place I tried to murder him before, dodging my swats like a Jedi master of the Arthropic Kind. Is this war or did I sublet the top right edge of my mirror? And besides all that, where's his scuttling instinct?
The scuttling phenomenom is why most humans abhor creepy crawlies. Lazier the bug, the "cuter" they seem (of course, you have to factor in sliminess too). But out of the legged insects, you've got your caterpillar-slash-butterfly, your ladybug, your...well, that's that's about it for the cute list. Roaches are at the bottom of the hierarchical creep heap, squashed (but always surviving) by human hatred, way beneath the slugs, wasps and hairy-legged spiders. But this roach is without a doubt the mellowest roach I've encountered. If I were a professor of cockroach psychology, I'd go so far as to say that there is something scientifically intriguing about this particular cockroach's individuality, an anomaly to arthropods everywhere.
Suddenly, my sensibilities shifted: maybe he's not so bad - maybe that little critter out there is my new roommate. Tonight, I even found myself looking for him in his regular spot when I brushed my teeth to go to bed. If I don't see him tomorrow when I get home from work, I might even be...disappointed.
But if I do see him, I'm gonna name him...As long as he doesn't breed. Admittedly an unrealistic expectation. Procreation-fueled fucking is what cockroaches do: another reason we humans despise their kind. If it's not 'pants-off' inside the plumbing, then it's screwing under the sink, or shagging behind the sheet rock. Inevitable insect orgies. And then, gasp, Infestation. That dirty, dirty word for anyone who has ever had to deal with it.
Alexa (that deranged talking/listening device made by Amazon) declares that one pair of cockroaches and their young can produce up to 300,000 vermin a year. That's a hell of a lot of rumpy-pumpy for a bug with a sex organ on the short side of a tooth-pick-prick. Hopefully this roach was made impotent by chemical warfare or better, castrated by my fly-swat, which would explain why he's so goddamn chill - because he is no longer driven by survival of the species. I visualize the science community dedicating hospitals and benches to me after the publication of my research paper "Philosophies of a Eunuch Roach" (I'll have to learn to interpret the meaning of all that antennae activity.)
But, if we can make that deal: we both stay single and celibate, we could probably live together side-by-side without any problems at all. He'd be the most diva cockroach this side of the Williamsburg Bridge, sharing my apartment rent-free, filling his crunch-coated belly with my delicious take-out leftovers – the cream of Brooklyn cuisine. Plus he'll have my personal guarantee of his life. And I'll have someone to look out for when I got home. Someone/thing to visualize when I yell a loony "Honey, I'm Hoooome!" after kicking the door shut, before I realize there's no one to come home to anymore.
Actually, I've already decided, his name is Sid. Whether I see him again or not. It's Sid.
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A Cockroach in Brooklyn - A Darkly Amusing Short Story
Humor"Feature of the Week" Jan 2019, Wattpad Reviewer @Andyjo1 A unique, light-hearted, non-teen story by a British writer with a dark sense of humor. Stuck in a funk after being dumped, a 30 year-old woman gains a surprising new friend and roommate with...
