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Last Saturday morning, I was being a bit lazy, lounging around in bed and then I heard Peter get up to make coffee (and turn on the AC). Finally after one last big stretch, I fling my legs over the side of the bed and GAAAAHHH… there is was, my worst nightmare perched on top of the closet door frame, evil antennae swirling, and I knew there was no way I could get up on a chair (KNEES) to bash the fucker to death. Peter to the rescue, the deed is done, and I spent the rest of the day with PTHJ (post traumatic heebie-jeebies) jumpy as fuck.
So okay, as you all know already, there are usually 2-3 SIGHTINGS during “the season” (May-Sept), as it has been in all of the various Casa Azahars over the years… so it’s not a constant problem. I think the heat brings them out, whatever. But you know, here it is mid-August already and I hadn’t seen any of those vile creatures yet so I thought I’ve been lucky with just the one? Ha guess again.
Monday morning, 6 am, sun not yet risen. Of course I’ve been awake since 4 because I barely sleep anyhow (that’s a whole other story) and so I am doing my usual scrolling and reading on the phone, interspersed with Morcilla playtime (she LOVES it when I am awake in the wee hours). Then suddenly she shoots off. Well, okay I think, maybe I’ll be able to catch another hour or so of much needed sleep… but no. I hear scuffling. I try to ignore it, no way. So I sit up and see Morcilla laser-focused on the clay brick that is my doorstop (it keeps my bedroom door from shutting so the cats can come and go as they please). Oh no… I know what this means. I get up. I peek through the door opening and on the other side of the brick there’s Luna, equally focused, tail flicking. Oh fuck.
I nudge the door open slightly and THERE IT IS between the brick and the door. No no no… I grab the Shoe of Death I keep in the bookshelf under the window and, by now high on a cocktail of adrenaline, panic and fear, smash the fucker to smithereens. Still high on whatever I grab paper towels, scoop up the corpse and flush it, more than once, and then go about disinfecting the entire area around the brick. The cats are no longer interested. I’m exhausted but also elated… I did it! I killed it and disposed of it ALL BY MYSELF. And then the PTHJ sets in. Needless to say, there was no further sleep for me. In fact I may never sleep again.
casa azahar 
“I grab the Shoe of Death I keep in the bookshelf under the window and, by now high on a cocktail of adrenaline, panic and fear, smash the fucker to smithereens.”
I wish I had written this sentence. Well, no I don’t, because that would mean I’d had to slaughter a cockroach in my bedroom, but… you know what I mean.
It’s been many moons since I had to deal with monsters like that — a bit over fifty-five years to be more precise — but I had to spend a couple weeks during two successive summers in ancient student dormitories at a college well south of here, where the sweltering, swampy climate had fostered the growth of what I am sure were entire cockroach civilizations within the walls, perhaps a succession of them, like the Egyptian or Chinese dynasties or even the layers of ruins you read about in Mesopotamia. They probably had dialects and ethnicities. Easily three inches from stem to stern. The memory persists, gah.
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Many years ago one of my English students was an engineer with the water company and omg the stories he could tell. Apparently in all of these old houses the walls and drains are FULL of them but they normally stay where it’s dark and damp. Hell, I read somewhere that a cockroach can exist on a single strand of hair or flake of soap for a month. But what they can’t do without is water. The ones that COME OUT are either searching for water or they are the older weak ones kicked out when the COLONY BECOMES TOO BIG. gaaaaaaahh
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