My head-on collision

…with a cockroach

Originally distributed November 2009

When the weather started really warming up here in Swaziland the bugs started coming out. During my time in Hawaii I remember someone mentioning that following a full moon cockroaches tend to be in the mood for love, and so they also fly around more. Well the first full moon of spring seems to get them really excited, so excited that they don’t even hide from the light.

Hence one night I found my room at the lodge with more than a few of those small brown flying types. Thank goodness they weren’t the huge maroon ones! That would’ve been really disgusting. They were running around on the walls and ceiling and periodically flying from here to there. They’re pretty easy to kill though with a nice flat shoe and a confident “whack!” as long as you get to them before they take flight again.

Throughout the evening I only saw 2-3 at any given time. But as soon as I’d killed the ones I saw, more would appear. Where were these things coming from?! Probably from the space between the door and the floor, or through the unscreened windows before I closed them, or through electric wiring lines in the walls or ceiling. But nevermind about that. For some reason they seemed to like being on or near the beds too. This made smashing them a little tricky because if they were on the bed you couldn’t really squash them, and that’s gross anyway. If they were over the bed then you’d run the risk of their dead bodies falling onto the bed. So finesse was an order.

Now picture this, a twin bed in the middle of the room with the head-end against one wall, as beds usually are in a hotel room setting. There was a cockroach over the bed on the wall but too far for me to reach from where I was standing. I sprinted around the bed to get to it before it flew somewhere out of reach. After all, cockroaches are smart enough to know when someone’s trying to kill them. As I was rounding the foot-end of the bed the cockroach took off. It was headed across the bed, long-ways toward the curtains. I stopped in mid-sprint, sliding in my flip-flops, and leaned back as it flew by my head. Whew, that was close! I took a moment to laugh about our near head-on collision and admire its cunning strategy of flying to the curtains, a place where it was both hard to find, because of the pattern on the curtains, and hard to kill because it wasn’t on a hard surface.

I don’t know if I went to bed that night with that one still alive or not because I killed several more before I went to bed, but I know I hadn’t gotten them all. Who knows where they went while I was sleeping. I try not to think about it. But I’m not gonna lie. During those weeks of high cockroach densities I never slept very well because I just knew they were probably flying over my head and crawling on me. Yuck!!