Once upon a time the other day, me and Roommate were hanging out with a college friend of hers who was visiting before moving to Hawai'i. Suddenly, Roommate gasped and cringed and pointed at the wall. There was a pretty sizeable black cocroach there—the first we'd seen since moving here.
None of us wanted to deal with it. I got a cup and a piece of paper to let it outside, but then I shrank away. What if it flew at my face?! So we grabbed a shoe. For a few minutes, we took turns holding the shoe, approaching the roach, and taking practice swings. But no one was able to bring themselves hit it. Finally I grabbed the shoe, ran up to it, and smacked hard. Terrified at what I'd done, I shrieked and ran back, pushing past them to get as far away from the theoretically dead roach as possible.
"I think you missed," Hawai'i said.
I was almost relieved. I hate crunching exoskeletons.
Hawai'i picked up the shoe and finished the job, finally throwing its crushed corpse in the garbage.
The next evening, after Hawai'i had gone home, Roommate was making a late dinner. As she reached for a spoon, a large shadow zoomed across the back wall behind the fridge.
"Oh God, did you see that?!" Roommate asked.
"Where did it go?" We looked frantically around and then saw it up in the opposite corner of the kitchen. It was the size of a human palm, with antennae several inches long.
"Either it's freaky fast," Roomate said, "...or there's two of them. Maybe it's an infestation!"
This was too much. We dashed out into the main room and leaped into each other's arms. Why, oh why are cockroaches so scary? They don't even *do* anything. Like, at all. They just crawl around and sometimes fly. Maybe it's because they're dinosaurs. Maybe it's because they're huge....
"One of us needs to get a boyfriend," I said decidedly to Roommate. "This is what guys are for—for carrying things and dealing with giant bugs. Honestly, any of your suitors would be fine. In fact, our neighbor down the hall would be fine—he'd be great; he lives close!" (I was referring to a specific mild-mannered bespectacled neighbor.)
Roommate didn't argue. "Next time I'm on a date with someone, I'll think of that. You know what, he'll do."
And then it was gone. We couldn't find it anywhere. "I don't know which thought horrifies me more," I said: "it might have crawled into the wall or it's in our drawers somewhere." I grabbed a shoe, knowing full well I'd never have the courage to smash it—think of its thick exoskeleton crunching, the gooey organs smushing out, its angled legs twitching, its lifeless head staring out at me—and I stood up on a chair to search. I shook the fridge, messed with the dishes, trying to scare it out. To give myself courage, I kept trying to imagine the cockroach from Wall-E, which did not really help because I knew this poor thing was going to die. "If I find it but it doesn't fly out at me," I said, "I might not even scream."
Eventually we had to give up. That roach was gone.
Then, when I went to fill a glass with, water, I realized the roach was only inches away from my hand, sitting on the water faucet handle, nibbling at our dish rag. It didn't fly. I did scream, and Roommate cried out and curled up in the fetal position on the couch.
"Go get one of the neighbors," I said.
"I'm not wearing pants."
"Or you could stay here with the cockroach to make sure it doesn't move."
She grabbed a sweatshirt and went down the hall to a neighbor's house, where he and his wife were putting their baby to bed.
While she was gone, I stood and talked with the cockroach:
Me: I'm sorry, cockroach. You aren't even doing anything wrong. You're just being here, eating food. But you're going to die for that.
Cockroach: Hah! Cockroaches are pretty much invincible. I can handle it.
Me: No, actually, you're going to die tonight.
Cockroach: (pauses pensively) Oh. Well, that's alright. The species will survive! We have survived for millenia. My existence is not as important as the collective existence of the Roach.
Me: um....
Luckily, this uncomfortably long conversation was interrupted when Roommmate came in with Neighbor. Apparently when he saw her face he was worried we were in some kind of danger. When she told him it was a roach, he laughed. But then when he saw it, his eyes grew wide. "Holy moley, that thing's huge!" he said. We backed off. This was a roach big enough to intimidate a Texan man.
Neighbor, now bearing the title Hero, stepped back into the kitchen and rolled up his sleeves. He tried to smash it with a shoe, but it was resilient. The dishes in the sink clanked as he fought with the monster—with his bare hands, and maybe also a used fork. After a minute, he exited the kitchen holding a wad of paper towels. The harmless but horrifying beast was dead.
"Thank you so much!" we cried, and the Hero removed the body of the innocent cockroach from our apartment.
Our hearts pounding, we sat on the couch, still clinging to each other a little bit, remembering at last to breathe.
I'd love to say I got a good night's sleep after that adventure, but I didn't. I kept dreaming that it was a cockroach invasion.
