The Flying Cockroach

Dad’s battle with an invader (second of two shorts based on my Dad)

Photo by RHJ

The inland house seemed perfect until we learned the cockroaches had claimed it first. Every kind, including the ones with wings.

Dad had the place exterminated and fumigated, then exterminated again, before we moved a single box. He despised cockroaches the way he despised mice and rats, which is to say with his whole spine. For a year the house gave us no reason to doubt him.

Then one night after dinner, mom filled the kitchen sink with warm, soapy water. Dad stood by with a clean dish towel. I ferried plates from the table. A shadow slid across the light fixture.

Flying cockroach.

I knew the rumor. A flying cockroach had snarled itself in some girl’s hair just long enough to lay eggs, and days later she woke screaming, hatchlings streaming down her forehead and into her ears. Mom called it nonsense. But at ten, any nonsense with familiar furniture in it counted as fact.

“Oh, my God! A flying cockroach!”

I yanked the towel out of dad’s hands and tented it over my head.

Dad snatched mom’s House Beautiful off the counter and rolled it into a truncheon. Then he thundered around the dining room after the thing, which kept boomeranging back to the light above the table.

Mom called the play-by-play. “It’s over here now! It’s by the lamp! Oh, no! It’s above the table!”

I wedged myself into a corner of the dining room, toweled, peeking out to check the hunt. During one lull the whole room held still: Dad heaving, the cockroach parked on the ceiling beside the light with its antennae twitching. Two athletes between rounds.

Dad decided on a sneak attack.

He climbed onto a dining room chair and stretched, but the house had high ceilings. So he changed tactics and climbed onto the table itself, one of those ovals balanced on a single fat pedestal. He crept toward its center. “Aha!” The magazine cracked down on empty ceiling.

The cockroach hopscotched to the far side of the light fixture. Dad picked his way over the dirty dishes, hunting the most useful angle.

“Let me remove the dishes, Ken! Let me remove the dishes!”

Dad, deaf with purpose, stalked his prey.

Just as he wound up for the swing, he rocked all his weight onto one foot for extra lift. The table curtsied. Plates skated, cutlery chimed, dad whooped, his feet auditioning for solid ground, and he sat down hard in the leftover mashed potatoes.

Mom and I cried laughing while the cockroach lapped my poor dad’s head twice and sailed out the front door, right past my brother coming in.

No dish broke. Dad announced, loudly, that he could have died, then walked away with a bruised ego and fresh material.

Those jokes always opened with “I once knew this fellow . . .” and closed with dad laughing louder than anyone.

Author’s Note

1. Anyone who has lived in or visited the tropics (the Caribbean, Florida, or Hawaii, for example) knows about flying cockroaches.

2. I am still afraid of flying cockroaches (really, cockroaches of any kind…ewww).

3. Read the other short story based on my Dad, I, Brutus.

   I, Brutus

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