Kockroach Read Free Page A

covering goes over the white thorax covering and the narrow piece of cloth slides under the flaps around his prothorax. He discovers that the knot of the narrow piece of cloth slides. He slips it up until it is tight and he likes it, the tighter the better.

    On the floor of the little room are two shiny brown things with some sort of pocked design. He caresses one, remembering the feel of his old chitin, before he slips them onto the tips of his legs. There are strings hanging off either side. He pulls hard at the strings and tucks them into the edges of the brown things.

    All buttoned up, tightened and taut, feeling much more protected than before, he takes the photograph back to the panel over the basin and stares at his reflection.

    Not everything is right.

    There are little hairs on his face and none in the picture. He tries to pull them out one by one but it is impossible, they are too short to grip.

    All the people in the picture are doing something strange with their mouths. He stares in the mirror and stretches his mouth to show the teeth atop his mandibles. It is a fearsome sight but it must serve some purpose in human culture, maybe a warning. He practices his warning grimace for many minutes.He will wear it constantly, he tells himself, to keep danger away.

    Finally, all the males have something atop their heads. Kockroach searches the room until he finds just such a thing sitting on the bureau. It is brown and stiff, and following the example of the picture, he places it on his head. He goes back to the basin and compares what he sees in the panel with what is in the picture. He turns the thing around. Better. He tilts it. Much better.

    “Hey, Smith, you in there?” he says into the panel. His voice is high, almost twittering, but with a deep rumbling undertone that rises like a predator to swallow the high notes. He tries again. “Smith, hey. You okay? Is something the matter?” He keeps speaking, baring his teeth all the while, repeating the sequence of sounds he had heard through the door until his voice matches the voice of the human who had been banging.

     

    He finds a storage pouch in the brown thorax covering for the picture. On the desk he finds something small and brown and shiny, a folder filled with little green papers with human faces on them. He puts this into a different pouch. He considers taking the thick black thing whose leaf he had eaten, but it is too big for the pouches and he hadn’t found it very palatable and decides he can do without it.

    It is time.

    He searches for a way out of the room. He goes first to the window from where the blinking red light slithers. There is agap in the bottom. He sticks his claws in the gap and pushes the window up. The noise of the outside world attacks him, like a swarm of wasps. He sticks his head out. The red light is right next to him, painfully bright, hissing loudly at him every time it goes on. He wonders who is flicking the switch. He looks down and feels a burst of fear that tells him it is too high to jump. There are humans walking back and forth below him, little humans, a species no bigger than cockroaches. He will be a giant among them. But still he needs to find a way out.

    He goes to the door that had been banged on that day. He tries to open it and fails. He fiddles with the hard shiny things along its side and tries again and still fails. He grips the knob on the side of the door and pulls as hard as he can and the door falls apart with a splintering crash.

    Kockroach drops the knob, steps over the debris, and strides down the hall, his hat at a jaunty angle, the V’s of his claws moving up and down with each step.

    “Can you flush the toilet or something, Jesus?” he says as he makes his way down the hall and into the world. “People are living here, for Christ’s sake.”

2

    They call me Mite. You got a problem with that?
    Mite, as in Mighty Mite, on account of my size. They meant it as a joke, them bully Thomasson