A Cockroach Story

A Cockroach Story
(With some homage to Kafka, of course)

Roaches crept around the apartment all night, brittle bugs behind wallpaper, crouching in cupboards. Big bugs.

Ann had been to Tru-Valu to find the most lethal poisons but nothing worked for long. Oil-slick wings folded stiffly against their turd-colored sides, feelers groping with infuriating insistence, they survived her every attack.

Whenever she squashed one, she retched. They were the size of small mice, and their splat was not pleasant.

This morning, she cleaned up her late-night kill and dumped it in the toilet. She got ready for work. She put on the silver scarab necklace her aunt Allie had given her for Christmas. Aunt Allie knew about Ann's love for Egyptian mythology. The silver scarab shimmered between her breasts.

She managed to be on time to the factory, a small sweatshop reminiscent of Dickens that reeked of layers of old oil. Ann sat down at her machine, which looked vaguely like an insect with its spindly metal wheels and arms. Ann bandaged her fingers to protect them from the hair netting that spewed from a wheel all day. Her right foot jerked down on the wood pedal that snapped frantically. With one swift hack of the razor that jutted like a mandible from the side of the machine, Ann cut a piece of hair netting and plopped it into the box by her feet.

It was getting hot already although it was still pretty early in the morning. The air was still and musty in the non-air-conditioned space. If some windows weren't open, letting in a minimal breeze, the place would have felt even more like a tomb than it did. Women sat in rows on wood seats--mostly Italian or Puerto Rican girls with proudly kept hair and neat dresses. Because they spoke broken English, they had limited job opportunities. Around them, the machines hummed like insects, thumped and clanged like some primordial raw gong.

At break time, sweating, Ann walked to an old fridge against the far wall near the restrooms and pulled out the diet soda she had deposited there at eight o'clock. She noticed the roach bait around the fridge's base. She shuddered.

Ann seated herself outside, in the small alley against the factory's cinderblock wall. The sun beat red hot on her head and arms. She sipped her cold Coke.

She glanced down at her chest. The sun hit the scarab's smooth silver with a tiny stab of scarlet light, a wink of blood red.

Ann felt as if the drone and clack-clack of the factory had become a faint booming from deep in the earth. She knew this was the voice of Khephra, the buried sun, calling to her. She felt that being at this factory was somehow important to the mythic journey that was her life.

When the workday was over, Ann walked home through a sudden storm. A brisk wind hurled the trees against the steel grey sky and pellets of rain slapped her face as she finally opened her front door.

At this time of day, if her roommate was home, she was usually parked in the old overstuffed chair in front of the TV, watching sitcom reruns, her legs draped over the chair arm, a beer on the table. But today Ann had the place to herself.

She went into her bedroom and lay down. It was good to be home. But she felt vaguely uneasy. Every pore of her body radiated nervous energy, as if the essence of the wind had entered her being and was whipping away under her skin like ghostly snakes.

The gusts were growing outside too. Then they stopped.

Ann heard a minute sound coming from the far corner of the room. It grew in irritating volume to a scratching, a rustle. Ann turned to get a close look.

It was a grandmother roach, the size of a mint patty, creeping along the floor. It crawled onto a pile of paper, sending out a nerve-wrackingly subtle crumpling sound as it walked over razor-thin edges of newsprint.

Ann shivered. The newspaper heaved in maddeningly slow motion, as if in labor. Ann's nerves fought her eyes and ears with needles of irritation.

The roach slipped under the paper and was still.

She must pass through her repugnance somehow. After all, this was part of her universe. This was a cousin of the earthly embodiment of Khephra, the scarab god of Egypt. The scarab beetle carried its egg in a roll of shit in its mandibles for protection.

She imagined her own legs becoming spindly and serrated. Her flesh became an oil-slick shell.

Her roach-body grazed the floor as she lumbered along on her eternal quest for food. Her belly gnawed with hunger.

To grasp in her mandibles that object of desire, that warming object that answers all emptiness, that quiets, for the tiniest speck of time, the cold craving--that was the glimpse of light, of freedom, toward which she made her agonized pilgrimage across the floor. Her mandibles were empty, and she felt her emptiness as an almost insatiable hunger. She went for an empty Coke can with dribble caked on the rim.

She stalked on. It seemed to take an aeon to get to the Coke dribble.

The satiation was intense. It felt like the sun glowing from her middle. It felt like she held the sun in her brown mandibles. She had never been so enraptured.

Ann came out of her trance. How much duller it felt to be human, at first.

She lay on the bed for a while, fingering her silver scarab. She hated her factory job--who wouldn't? The scarab helped her get through the day. She knew how to call upon the god at any time.

When morning came again, Ann wore the scarab to the factory and took her place at her machine.

When the shift got into full force, the clack-clack of the machines was almost unbearably loud. The irritation this caused her was familiar. In fact, it felt like the god was calling her.

She listened to the boom-boom that seemed to come from deep in the earth. Of course, only Ann heard it. It resounded through the factory, overpowering the clickety, rumbling machinery. A deep boom--boom--like a great bronze shaman drum, vibrating all matter to its tune.

Ann knew she would hear its meaning--though not exactly in words--for the rest of her life.