HOW TO KILL COCKROACHES

Option 1: Waterboarding
The best place you can find cockroaches is in the shower, because that’s where all the water is. The first thing you do is be aware of your surroundings. Every time you get into the shower, check all the corners. The walls, the handles, and the little shelf where you keep your soaps.

On the unlucky chance you find a cockroach, the next thing to do is to reach for the shower head. The best way to do this is to put one foot in the shower (just one), so you can keep your balance. Then you stretch yourself to grab the shower head. Then you hold it in your left hand, with your right ready to turn on the water. This way, the cockroach will have no time to flee. By the time it realises what’s going on, it’s already swirling down the drain in a flurry of water and hair.

Option 2: Mother
Sometimes, you find yourself outside the shower, but there the cockroach is, still. On your desk. On your bed. Taunting you. (The bed is the worst because you can’t even kill it if you want to.)

Back when the only way I knew how to kill cockroaches was through the shower, or the sink, and I was too scared to try with my bare hands, the only thing I knew how to do was call for my mother. I would scream. Screaming wasn’t enough, I would scream that there was a cockroach in my room and I didn’t know what to do, and my mother would come into the room and kill it with a tissue, without a lick of emotion on her face.

One day, I was trying to fix a syringe (I had just gotten my wisdom teeth pulled out. Anaesthetic was still running through my veins. I needed the syringe to shoot water into my mouth to clean the blood out) when the thin metallic bit went straight through my finger. I pulled it out, numb, along with a burst of blood. I opened my mouth in a puddle of blood and gauze and shock and pain, and I screamed.

My mum didn’t come. Later, she told me it was because she thought it was because I had just seen another bug. And that hurt, on a dozen different levels, like my chest is a tiramisu cake, or lasagna. I put pressure on my finger until the bleeding stopped, and wrapped it in a Disney princess band-aid.
 

I didn’t ask my mum for help killing bugs again.

Option 3: Poisonous Gas
It began like this: I complained about the cockroaches. My mum bought a can of cockroach spray. You’re supposed to spray it in room corners and sinks, which would kill cockroach eggs. I sprayed the cockroach spray in the designated corners. I woke up the next morning to find roach corpses scattered across the bathroom and kitchen floor. Now, I keep the spray next to my bedside.

One night, I woke up to find a cockroach squirming inside an empty water glass I had left on the desk. One puff. I watched the cockroach die in a puff of white particles, writhing and twitching.
 

All cockroaches die the same way. On their back, belly up, legs curled inwards. Sometimes I find them flat, like they’ve been stepped on again and again, flattened to barely a piece of paper.
 

There’s something haunting about the cockroach in my water glass—round and fat, like it has just gorged itself on its last meal. And I’m thinking about how this cockroach, one day, while doing nothing particularly out of the ordinary, was killed, slowly, by forces vastly in excess of anything he was designed to experience. In this way, am I not more like him than different?
 

I put the water glass in the kitchen sink. The next day I found the glass cleaned and polished and drying on the rack. I do not know what ever happened to the cockroach’s corpse.