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 of bleach. It didn’t seem to tire. As I said, it hadn’t moved that fast when I had confronted it.

I thought that it would soon cease struggling in vain to right itself and would die, as roaches in the Philippines had done. 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.