I’ve seen cockroaches four times in my life. The first time I was a freshman in college on a night walk around Arkansas State University. I was wearing flip-flops. There were what I would guess to be about 50 cockroaches running across the concrete sidewalk, slipping over my toes and causing me to do an impressive tiptoe dance.
The second time I saw a roach was in the lobby of Frances Crawford my sophomore year. Every girl was slipping towards the front door saying, “Eww,” “Gross” or “Ugh, cockroaches are disgusting.”
This weekend marked my third and fourth time to see a cockroach.
I had returned to my dorm with my roommate after seeing “A Movie Musical” and was rushing to get back out the door to go to Wendy’s. I went to set my phone down on the sink counter, but couldn’t. There was a giant roach the size of my thumb lounging on the edge of the sink.
Naturally I screamed bloody-murder. This caused my roommate to scream equally as loud and run over to see the commotion.
“Kill it, kill it,” I shouted at her.
“No way, I’m not touching it.”
“Please, I don’t know what to do,” I said. She agreed to kill it and I rushed into the bathroom, saying I wouldn’t come out until the deed was done. After what should have been enough time to smash a roach, I poked my head out of the bathroom.
“What are you doing?” I asked her. She was crouching down by the sink, eye to eye with the cockroach, taking pictures with her cell phone.
“It’s huge,” was all she said.
We didn’t kill the roach that night. It scurried into a gap in our sink counter.
That night while lying in bed, I tried to get over my newly formed fear of the insect by thinking about Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” How would I feel if I woke up one morning, transformed into a cockroach? Would I appreciate two girls screaming at me as I sat helplessly on the edge of a sink, out of the cold but in great danger of death?
Two nights later the roach was back on the sink. I ran to my friend’s room to get the Raid. Forget Kafka’s story — I was determined to kill this bug.
With Raid in hand, I had a power in me I hadn’t had during the last encounter. I sprayed that cockroach. It withered about. I sprayed again. It slipped into the gap in the counter, but much slower than before. It probably died in there because after it disappeared I sprayed the area yet again, just to be sure it wouldn’t return. And then I sprayed a last time for my own sanity.
Did you know cockroaches can move as fast as a human walks? If I could move as fast a cockroach does in terms of its body length to miles per hour ratio, I could be racing around at over 200 miles per hour.
I never want to be a cockroach. I never want to see another cockroach. Four times in a lifetime is enough for me.
I’ve lived in Alabama for 36 years and never have I seen a cockroach. People in Arkansas are so lucky!