ten ₱esos

Last night I saw, from the den, a cockroach calmly crawling across the kitchen floor. I thought, ‘What audacity! The apartment’s not dark and silent. I haven’t gone to bed yet.’ I walked to the kitchen, picked up my spray bottle of chlorine bleach, used for sanitizing and cleaning and insect ‘control.’ I set the nozzle to ‘STREAM’ then aimed at the intruder which didn’t seem to notice that I was standing behind it. I shot.

It foolishly crawled into a corner. Perfect! I hosed it, it didn’t like that, and it scurried to a dustpan which I then lifted. It didn’t zoom under the kitchen counter or anywhere. It seemed unsure – left? right? reverse? I hosed it with bleach again, and it flipped and waved its legs far faster than it had when it was right-side-up. I had read that cockroaches can run 5 feet in a second. Well, this one was not swift.

It flailed in a miniature puddle or bleach. It didn’t seem to tire. I had thought that it would soon cease struggling in vain to right itself and die, as the Philippine roaches did. But it continued to wave its legs, even after I sprayed its head with bleach.

I scooped a handful of loose frost from the freezer and plopped it on the roach. That stopped its flailing until the frost melted within half a minute. Only the weight of the frost had stopped the critter. ‘Gee, this thing just won’t die,’ I thought. The roaches in the Philippines would quickly give up in the face of bleach, and I would dispose of them. Malaysian roaches may be hardier, or that bugger was anomalous.