This post is a guest post, courtesy of a friend-of-a-friend (whom I have actually never met, but feel as though we are kindred spirits). Our mutual friend read me this email one day, and immediately I thought, "Oh my God, this is my life. I must post this on Uncharted forthwith." So here it is. To get more of Nicky's wit, follow her here: Www.lizaleigh.tumblr.com
For any of you who know me, you know that I am a fairly independent woman, with all the Tori-Amos-listening, take-myself-on-a-movie-date-having girl rights pertaining thereto. Where I draw the line, however, is killing roaches. I just. Can't. Do it. They freak me out. It's about the twitching and the crunching and the debatable "hatching more roach eggs in your baseboards and also hatching a maniacal plan to take over first your house and then the world" that these creatures possess. So, it is in that spirit I present to you: The Stowaway Roach.
"Sure," you think, "Why not buy the organic potting soil? If all goes well I'll be eating these herbs eventually." And then you set the leftovers aside, the top of the bag rolled shut.
Three weeks later you reopen the bag, thinking to move one of the plants to a larger pot, and ROACHES THERE ARE ROACHES ROACHES HAVE SET UP SHOP IN THE ORGANIC STUFF THEY ARE THE SIZE OF YOUR THUMB and they fly at your face. You manage to keep hold of your shit and grab a broom and sweep most of them off the deck, but one escapes and hides behind a folding canvas chair stashed in the corner. You let it live, because oh god you need to go sit down and breathe. Your cats stare intently from the wrong side of the sliding glass door. They are no help.
Then a hurricane hits and you've got to clear the balcony: the plants and the table and the chairs all come inside to clutter up the living room for a few days. The basil throws a hissy fit at being out of direct sunlight for 36 hours and drops all its lower leaves, but you're more concerned about the cats, who have suddenly become obsessed with that folding chair propped up in the hall...
And then you remember that lone surviving roach. Did you, all unwittingly, carry it inside? You did, didn't you. You get your spouse to come and inspect the chair. He finds nothing. You go to bed, but before you can drift off the cats throw themselves against the bedroom door, reaching under it to pat at the carpet on your side. "Oh god it's inside. It's in here with me," you think. You have played this game before and you know how it ends (it ends with a bug crawling up your naked back in the night).
So you turn on all the lights and look under and behind all the furniture while your spouse tries to convince you that sometimes cats are neurotic and chase things that aren't really there, but you've seen this obsessive focus from them in the past and you know it's always related to Something That Got Away. You don't find anything, and you have to be up asininely early the next morning, so you tuck the sheets in super tight around the mattress and wriggle back into bed.
You sleep unmolested.
The next morning you stumble into the kitchen for breakfast. As you reach for the toaster, a combination of sudden movement and skittering sounds freezes you in place. There. IN YOUR MOTHERFUCKING KITCHEN SINK. The stowaway roach.
You haven't eaten yet and your body is not prepared for the combination of adrenaline and revulsion, so you go into robot mode. A switch flips and, before you realize it, you're wielding a slipper with the kind of precision you could never normally hope to muster. But your target, being a roach, is only partially flattened by a direct hit. It makes one last bid for the edge of your sink, but you flip it back with the toe of your slipper. This nice new sink in your nice new apartment has a spray nozzle. A short blast knocks the roach into the drain. Another, and it's gone from view. You run the garbage disposal.
You run the garbage disposal until you've finished your breakfast. And you rethink the whole 'organic' thing.
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