When I was young, on hot summer nights when my head hit the moldy sweat-soaked pillow in the lonely safety of my bedroom, I stared out the screen window and filed away another day of jumbled thoughts. I plugged the screen with rags to keep the misquotes out. When sleep came, the nightly battle began with the creepy Insecta Blattaria, the cockroach, the malevolent fecund propagator prowler of the dark. Sometimes in the night, I was terrorized by the creepy crawlers crawling on me. My terror increased when my grandfather told me cockroaches used to feed on the eyebrows of the Christopher Columbus sailors. When I turned on the two bare fluorescent tube kitchen lights on late-night trips to the kitchen, I was startled by black cockroaches as large as my thumb. The light triggered a jailbreak to dark safety under the stove and between cracks in the baseboard, into food cupboards and spaces I didn’t know were there.
In the morning, when I poured my second bowl of Wheaties, a cockroach popped out of the bowl and scampered for its life. I can’t even look at a box of Wheaties on the store shelf without recalling the memory.
