by Tyler Knox
Kockroach knows dead and this is it.
A sound erupts from his abdomen. Kockroach spins, scared. The sound comes again and with it he can feel a vibration and suddenly he is certain that it is time to eat.
How can he be so certain?
Because, for a cockroach, it is always time to eat.
Kockroach searches the apartment for food, pulls out drawers, inspects the room with the cloths, the room with the seat. There are the brown lumps in the bowl of the great white seat, but that is feces, he knows, and even cockroaches won’t stoop so low as to eat their own feces, though the feces of other species are often a culinary treat.
In the desk he finds a thick black thing with shiny gold edges. He used to eat such things, used to delight in the tasty gobs of pale paste oozing from the back. He tries to gnash the thing in his teeth but his mandibles aren’t strong enough. He splits it open and rips out a thin individual leaf with its black markings, stuffs it in his mouth. He chews and chews until it is soft enough to swallow. He leans down, throws it up on the floor, sucks it up and swallows it again. He still is hungry but he doesn’t want to eat another leaf.
From the desk he takes a strange rectangular fetish and tries to bite it. Failing to turn it into food, he examines it instead. It is a picture, highly detailed in shades of gray, a picture of humans, a group of them, wearing cloths and shiny coverings on the tips of their legs. He is surprised to recognize variances among the humans. Their faces are not all the same, and somehow he can pick out the facial differences as if the ability is an integral part of this new body. Only one of the faces in the picture is identical to his own. Standing next to the human with the same face as Kockroach is another human, this human covered in white cloths, its face surrounded by masses of light, curly hair, its facial features very soft and very even. This human, and the human with Kockroach’s face, have their arms bizarrely intertwined.
Kockroach feels something strange. He looks down. What he had assumed was his wormlike abdomen has swelled and is now sticking straight out. He bats it down but it pops up again and the whole process, the batting down and the popping up, feels good, feels pretty damn terrific. He does it again and again. The abdomen grows even harder, longer, his head swarms as if inundated with pheromones.
He looks back at the picture, at the face with the light, curly hair. So that is a human female and the wormlike thing is not an abdomen. He is relieved that there are human females. And with the relief a new determination appears as if suddenly implanted in his brain.
He raises again the picture to his face. Yes, there are other females in the group, and a nymph, and all the faces are different except for the one that is just like his and just like the face on the hanging human. He turns around and looks at the dead thing. He does not like that they share the same face. Something tells him this is wrong, that he needs to be unique.
His stomach growls.
He slides over to the hanging piece of meat and chews off its face, regurgitates it onto the floor, scoops it up and swallows it. He eats until he can eat no more. The thing hanging now is faceless, his head just a mass of red chewed meat. Good. Now there is only Kockroach.
He sits on the floor, opens his mouth, and begins to groom himself. He can’t reach everywhere, but he cleans what he can with his tongue and teeth. What he can’t reach with his mouth he rubs frantically with his legs and arms. It takes an hour.
Suddenly tired, he sees the sky outside his window begin to dawn. Someone must have flicked the switch. He crawls under the bed until he is again surrounded by pressure and falls back asleep.
In the middle of the day Kockroach is startled awake by a banging on the door he couldn’t open.
“Hey, Smith, you in there?”
The voice is loud, deep. Kockroach slinks closer to the wall, stays silent and still.
“No one’s seen your face since the girl left two, three days ago. You still in there?”
There is more banging, the door shakes but remains closed.
“Smith, hey. You okay? Is something the matter?”
More shaking. Kockroach crouches beneath the bed, ready to scurry away if the door opens.
“Look, Smithy, your week’s up tomorrow and we want you out. There’s been complaints about a smell. Can you flush the toilet or something, Jesus? People are living here, for Christ’s sake. You’re out tomorrow or we’re gonna have to come in and get you. We need a bust down the door, we’re gonna charge you for it. You got that?”
A final bang, a final shake of the door, and then footsteps disappearing.
Kockroach shivers with fear and falls back asleep.
Kockroach knows he must leave. The predator that had been banging in the middle of the day will come back, they always come back he has learned, especially in kitchens in the middle of the night. Here, he knows, there is no good place to hide. But before he leaves he sits again on the white seat and groans loudly and feels the pleasure of the wet thing slipping out of him.
He stares a long time at the picture with the group of humans. The males in the picture are all covered in the same way and Kockroach, missing his chitinous armor, wants to be covered too. He remembers the cloths hanging in the small cozy room.
Using the picture as a guide, he attempts to place the cloths upon his body. He tries the long black tubes on his claws, on his ears, but finds they go best on the tips of his legs. He sticks his legs through the soft white thing with one big hole and three small holes. The center hole between his legs, he assumes, is to allow the wormlike thing between his legs to grow when he is mating. Based on the size of the hole it must grow very big indeed. The soft white thing with one stretchy hole and two smaller holes he puts on his head but finds he can’t see and takes it off. Hanging from a hook is a narrow loop with a knot which, from the picture, he can tell goes around his prothorax.
He has an easier time with the larger pieces because he can learn from the picture exactly how they go. The brown cloth to cover his legs, the white cloth to cover his thorax and arms. He spends a long time fiddling with the buttons but finally figures them out. The brown thorax 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, repeat
ing 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 a gap 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 twins from the schoolyard, all gristle and snarl. They hoped the name it would sting, but I took it as a badge of honor and wear it proudly still. Mite. That’s what you can call me.
You eating them shrimp?
Boss says I should stroll on over to the hotel, introduce myself, hand over the envelope what you’re waiting for. It’s all in there, everything I dug up on that son of a bitch Harrington what thought it was a brainy idea to run against the Boss. But I figured, whilst I’m at it, I’d also tell you a little something about the Boss hisself for that blab sheet you’re writing for. Do you want to hear the real story, missy, the truth about the millionaire candidate for the U.S. Senate and his soon-to-be bride? The truth according to Mite?
Don’t be so quick in saying yes, you might not like what you hear. It’s my story and I don’t like it one stinking bit.
Am I talking too fast for you? What was you, buried in the society pages afore they tapped you for this exposé? All parties and hemlines and Joes in bad toups trying not to stare at them flush society tits? Hey, what’s the difference between a Times Square whore and a society dame? Beats me.
But what I gots here for you is a story what could pull you out of the society racket and put you smack on the front page. A story of the rise and the fall and the resurrection. A story of a man searching for his place in an outsized world and finding nothing but a hole in his heart in which to fall. A story what will murder the Boss’s chances for the Senate.
But the Boss’s Senate run ain’t all I’ll be killing. Consider this my suicide note, because after this gets out I’m as good as gone too. But what the hell, I’m in the mood to bump my gums. And I gots my reasons for spilling. Alls I ask is that you write it straight.
So go ahead, missy, and fire up the reel-to-reel. I’m ready to begin.
They call me Mite, as in Mighty Mite, on account of my size.
I was born in Philly, same as the nation, Philadelphia, a city of alleyways and wild dogs. Nights, from the edges of Fairmount Park, you can hear them in the woods, the wild dogs, howling. Once, them Thomasson twins tied a string of wieners around my neck and dragged me into the dark depths of the park. A couple of cutups they was, them Thomasson twins, and when I peed my pants they held their sides and bent over as the laughter, it kicked the snot from their noses. I didn’t fight back, didn’t bust them boys, big as they was, in the snouts. Instead I ran away, pulling them wieners off my neck as I went—not throwing them away, mind you, in them days meat was meat—but I sure as hell ran. I suppose it was my heritage kicking in. We Pimelias, we’re runners.
My father was a runner too, Tommy Pimelia, a running star in high school, what spent his afternoons burning up the cinders on the four-forty track. He was a miler then, but I guess he moved on up to the marathon because he took off long ago and best as I can tell he’s still going. I often imagine what he would have been had he hung up them spikes. He might have grown fat, worn cardigans, affected a pipe, he might have called me sonny boy and tiger, had catches with me in the park, brought home toys in big white boxes. But all that hooey was my dream, not his. I was barely old enough to remember him afore he ran away from me. By then he could look at his son standing in the crib, his head still not reaching the top bar, and see him for what he was.
It’s not like he was no giant hisself, the son of a bitch.
My mother was like a ghost in my life after my father left, always present and yet not really there. I can see her still, sitting at the kitchen table, thin elbows on the Formica, straggly blond hair falling limply across her face. Her tattered housecoat is belted around her waist. The veins in her ankles pulse slowly. Fluffs of cotton pill off them dirty blue slippers on her feets. She brushes the hair off her eyes and stares out at me from her prison of vast sadness.
“What am I going to do with you, Mickey? What am I going to do?”
“Nothing, Ma.”
“Look at you. Let me get you some milk.”
“Another glass of milk and I’m going to puke on the floor, Ma.”
“Oh Mickey.”
I grabs my books, heads to the back door, to the wooden stairwell that leads three flights down to the alley, and then I stop. Back inside I gives my mother a kiss.
A smile flits across her thin lips, it is forced, a gesture purely for my benefit, a feeble attempt to make me feel all is right, and strangely, against all odds, it does. Because in them days I still believed the world was good and that something would come along and save us. What a sap I was, I can’t hardly tell. But still, I smiles back at my ma afore taking off for school, leaving her alone at the kitchen table.
My mother at the table, weighed down by her life, a husband long gone, an apartment infested with vermin, an affliction she can’t control, a boy what refuses to grow no matter how much milk she pours down his throat.
But hey, life ain’t fair, missy. You ever forget that, you’re a goner. Life is like a heavyweight on the ropes; no matter how beat you think you got the sucker, it can still reach out with one well-timed hook and send you spinning.
I was nine first time it happened.
My dad now was long gone and I was nine and in school and my ma every day was staffing the register at Klein’s Discount Clothes, where she fended off the advances of old man Klein and brought home my wardrobe from the clearance bins. Corduroy pants two sizes too big, stiff canvas shirts, shoes with rubber soles so thick they squeaked. I was like a one-man band when I walked down the school hallway, rub, squeak, scruff, squeak. Throw in Billie Holiday, I could have played at Minton’s. But that night, that first night, I was at the kitchen table, doing my homework, surrounded by the piles of sewing my ma took in for the extra money.
She stands at the stove, stirring a pot filled with canned corn—my mother’s idea of home cooking was canned corn and a butter sandwich—when suddenly she turns around and I sees something in her eye, or more precisely something not in her eye. Whatever had been there before, the worry, the disappointment, the love, it all has vanished. She is less than a stranger, a wax dummy of my mother filled only with sawdust and
the big empty. And she turns around again and again, spinning in ever-tighter circles. I wonders at first if she is playing, but then her body locks in on itself. I’m up in a snap and I grabs hold of her waist as the shaking starts. She hears not my pitiful cries of terror. She is rigid. I struggles to lay her gently on the rough wooden floor, and fails, and her head cracks onto the wood, and she doesn’t feel it, she doesn’t feel it, not a thing. I hugs her tight and wipes the foam from her mouth as she goes through it, her surface writhing and beneath the surface, scarier still, the big empty.