THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY
Two, maybe three, cockroaches
BC Pires
LAST WORKING DAY - night, really - of the old year and I see them as I'm taking what the English call my last slash before bed. They remind me of the joke about the Native American brave who asks his chief on what basis he names all the tribe's babies. 'It depends,' replies the chief. 'If a child is born during a storm, I might name it, 'Rolling Thunder.' Or I may look out at a herd on the prairie and so name the baby, 'Limping Buffalo.' In winter, I might name a child, 'Snow Falls Deeply,' in summer, 'Blazing Sun.' Tell me, do you understand now, Two Dogs Firetrucking?'
Last Wednesday night of the year, almost Thursday morning really, everything asleep in the house, except me and the two cockroaches on the shower floor I'm looking at, back-to-back, rear ends joined.
Two cockroaches firetrucking.
Somehow sensing my presence, they freeze; I've seen greater animation at a post-Cabinet press briefing. Knowing what I'll do next, I think of Brad Leithauser's poem 'Son,' written for his 'child who would not last/Even one whole day,' quoted by Ian McDonald in a Sunday Stabroek column: 'A look so haunted, so/Haunting, he would not confess (not even later, to his wife)/How it stayed with him, on him; the slow/Flicker in a watery eye/The mute call - through all/The exhausted hopefulness/The condemned come to know/In the end - from animal to animal/Imploring, Please save my life.'
Even with compound eyes, they could not elicit simple sympathy; the slipper was already in my hand. I open the shower door silently, not wanting them to reach the drain hole, assuming they could co-ordinate their movement while stiffly conjoined. How many hundred thousand would I prevent from coming into being? It was a good night for our side, those of us who hate them, which is most of us; Al Pacino's Tony Montana in Scarface, comes to mind, screaming, 'I buried those cock-a-roaches!'
The flimsy slipper - Chinese-made, like everything in the world today, including Trinidad Carnival - crashes down. Two - several thousand - in one blow.
Reinvigorated by the killing, I seek a movie to relax. Rejecting Deliverance - too close to home - and Lone Survivor - too ironic - I flick to the news channels. Tsunami news replaces Trump news, hard to say which more depressing. The Property Brothers come to the rescue and bring on the yawns.
Finally comes the new last bathroom visit.
In the shower, a battalion of ants wrestles with a single roach cadaver. I chance to look down at the toilet. (Men hardly ever do; ask sticky-bottomed women.) Was it thirst that had driven it to limp to the toilet bowl? It hangs on the edge, in the attitude of a creature that would drink, calling to mind another image, from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: horses and brutal men lapping cheek-by-jowl from the same water hole, animal to animal. It flaps its wings feebly, turns its ugly angular head towards me hopefully. But how could I rescue the very thing I'd destroyed? For
