not a cockroach

It all started on Christmas Eve. Peter had retired early and was all snug in his bed without a care, and I wandered into the kitchen to get a drink and OMG there were three (aack yes, THREE) cockroaches scuttling around on the floor. I quickly grabbed the Shoe of Death and somehow smacked them all to smithereens and it was only after I had taken care of disposing of their ghastly corpses (and the adrenaline started to wear off) that I started to wonder what the hell roaches were doing in my house IN WINTER. In over 33 years, and in all my different Casa Azahars, I had only ever come across 2 or 3 of the fuckers during the summer, which was bad enough. But then I remembered that I actually had 5 sightings last summer, which was unusual. And I have never seen more than one at a time. When I told Peter the next morning he joked about having been visited by the ghosts of Christmas roaches past (not funny).

Anyhow, since then I started seeing random roaches and I wondered if it had something to do with one of the shops downstairs that had had its drains flushed out mid-December. Maybe the roaches had been disturbed and started scattering throughout the building? I don’t know. I finally mentioned it to my downstairs neighbour who insisted she hadn’t seen any so I let it go until I finally couldn’t any more (had actually taken to sleeping with the lights on as sightings had become so frequent). I told my landlord about the problem just over a week ago and on Monday he sent over Pepe Matacucas (Roach Slaying Joe – not his real name) to check things out and he discovered that they were indeed (aaargh) nesting in the kitchen. So today he came over again to, well, slay roaches.

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