A Cockroach in Brooklyn - A Darkly Amusing Short Story

8. A Cockroach in Brooklyn - The Bitter End

It took a few moments of reflection to build up the brutishness. I bolstered my resolve with thoughts of stranger cockroaches, scuttling around in my kitchen, disappearing and reappearing - maybe one day I'll find one in my shoe, but only after I've put it on...barefoot. Or maybe one will crawl onto my pillow while I'm sound asleep and lay eggs next to my face...Or one might get inside my clothes...my underwear...UNthinkable.

With a nose wrinkled up in disgust, I apply a short sharp pressure to the mirror and hold it there. I press all my weight against it. It's a heavy steel-framed mirror. I don't feel any crunches or squeals, thank god. Then I release. "I'm sorry, Sid," I mutter at my reflection in the mirror. Everything seems extra quiet.

I considered removing the mirror from the wall and scraping off the remains of the star-crossed cockroaches, but decided against it. It would be too painful for me to see Sid that way, not to mention, disgusting - I've seen the thick goo that squelches out of a crushed cockroach shell too many times. Besides, the mirror is big and heavy and if I disturb the nail holding it up, it might never go back up again and living without a mirror at your only sink is Neanderthal living. I won't risk it.

I will let them disintegrate naturally. It's not like it will stink out my kitchen like an animal carcass would.

I stand at the mirror for a few moments. I avoid myself in the reflection. I look down at the sink. I will miss Sid. He really was a good cockroach. Maybe I made a mistake. Maybe he was a deterrent, a lone vigilante, protecting the sink area. Maybe all the left-over scraps were simply my protection contributions to him.

Maybe she wasn't even a friend of his, maybe she was a gatecrasher and he was plotting to get rid of her. He was hatching a plan right there as he twiddled his antennae out of the side of the mirror. Maybe now Sid's gone, all the other little cockroaches will come out of the woodwork and cause my worst nightmare – the dreaded infestation. Maybe I should have trusted him, let him have his little friend, if that is what she was, and not been so rash and downright insecticidal. I could have slowly fed her specks of cockroach poison, just enough to inhibit her reproductive system. But she was just so...scuttle-y...[shiver]

I really can't blame Sid for needing a little female company of his own kind. Just like I wouldn't be at all happy if a cockroach was my only companion. (No offense to Sid. As cockroaches go, you wouldn't find a better one.) But a cockroach family just isn't part of my live-and-let-live plan. I pay the rent around here. New York rent, no less. So I get to control who takes up residence here. Even if I'd have allowed Sid and his bitch to have children and allowed us all to live in harmony, there'd be a whole new democracy existing behind the mirror before I knew it. And the cockroach crowd mentality would be rife: they wouldn't all be like Sid and, even if they were, one Sid is all I can handle. That's the whole point to this story, the moral, if you will. One cockroach is more than enough. Two is already too many.

At this point, I shuffled back to the living room in my pink fluffy socks and soon my mind became re-absorbed into some reality scratch-your-eyes-out, take-your-boyfriend-show on TV and I forgot about Sid's rotting guts behind the mirror. But I'll never forget Sid, the anomaly to cockroaches everywhere. Maybe, by killing him, I freed him to be re-incarnated as a Hog-nosed bat – which by the way is the smallest mammal in the world and lives in Thailand. You've got to start somewhere. And, personally, I'd love to live in Thailand. Though I'm pretty sure that bats eat cockroaches – I wonder whether Sid the Bat will abstain, again proving himself an anomaly to his species. By the time he is reincarnated as a human, he'll be someone really special, I know it – maybe the Dali Lama or the Second Coming. I wonder if he'll hold it against me, that I killed him just as we were getting to know each other. Probably not. I'll probably be reincarnated as a cockroach by then and he'll keep me as a pet. Though he would have a far more adequate fly-swatting wrist flick.

Epilogue - Six months later

After Sid, there were no more cockroaches. I guess he was the last. I am happy and proud to have a cockroach-free apartment in Brooklyn. In the five years prior to Sid's arrival, it had been an ongoing battle between the man and the roach. And finally, I won. The glory was bitter-sweet, seeing as it came with the sacrifice of my friend Sid the Roach. But nonetheless, I won. RIP Sid.

Epilogue #2 - Ten Years Later

Luciano and I never got back together. I quit my high-powered, high-paying job in Manhattan and left Brooklyn with a backpack to travel around SE Asia for 6 months. It was the most breathtaking time of my pre-motherhood life. After a stint in San Francisco, I settled in Florida and met the dad of my two beautiful children. But that's a story for another time.

Copyright Sophie Evans

Author's note:

If you like A Cockroach in Brooklyn, please click VOTE on each page! It means so much. Either way, thanks for reading the whole damn thing!