Trailers for sale or rent. Rooms to let fifty cents.
As my mother's music coiled around my 10-year-old eardrums, I laid in the crosshairs of an early morning sun and a late summer breeze, flat on my back with covers pulled just above my chest. I blinked lazily to coax myself awake, when something weird caught my attention: two hair-thin antennae fanning the air near my chin.
My groggy eyes strained downward. What's this? Staring back at me was a cockroach the size of a bulldozer with a waxy brown body that could move faster than a wind-up Hot Wheel. I cringed at the thought of its ugly underbelly on my skin and barely opened my mouth to call for help. What if it scuttled into my throat?
"Mmumm."
My hands were stuck under the covers, the roach rocking atop my chest like a ship in shallow surf. Despite all efforts to be perfectly still, I could not stop breathing.
In my Technicolored imagination, the beast was plotting the nearest breach. Any moment, it would plunge into my nostril, feelers smoothed back along its shiny body armor, while prickly legs skittered frantically toward my brain. Lodged up there for the next decade, it would have nothing to eat but my brain matter.
My eyes cut to my six-year-old sister in the twin bed across from mine, sound asleep and sucking her thumb like a starving piglet—which was actually quite brilliant. Plugging one's mouth and positioning one's fist that close to one's nasal orifice was the ideal blockade for behemoths on the prowl. But my fate augured differently and, finally, I succumbed to tears.
Now it has to be said, roaches had long been the bane of my existence. It didn't help that school friends liked to bastardize my name by calling me Kimmie Cockroach. That only fueled my loathing and instilled in me the feeling that I was the Isaac Newton of roach lore. What else could explain the gravitational pull of the entire cockroach kingdom to our Phoenix home, a modest clapboard dwelling on cinder blocks? Their invasion bordered on the tyrannical and included the spaces between our walls, the pipes under our floorboards, and the empty crannies of our attic. They crept like insurgents under the cloak of night and scattered in all directions when we surprised them with lights. Caught with their putrid bounties, they tore gleefully across our linoleum like frisky dogs with wet butts. I envisioned them frolicking in our cesspool below the caliché, buoyed by their unflappable endurance in the evolutionary hierarchy.
"Eehhhhnnn."
My feeble call to Eryn through clenched teeth sounded guttural, but I feared startling the vermin into doing the unspeakable. If Eryn didn't wake and come to my rescue, time promised to march a thousand years with me in the same fossilized position, roach-rammed into catatonia. The signpost was up ahead. Next stop, the Twilight Zone.
My parents would be grief stricken. "No, it can't be! She was the good daughter." My siblings would stare and poke at me and jump on my bed just to watch me bounce like a two-by-four with no way to retaliate. Our relatives would visit en masse and remark how sad it was that I never blinked anymore. Walter Cronkite would appear dumbstruck on TV news, reporting that doctors the world over were confounded about my mystery ailment. Walter would take off his black-frames, rub the tears from his eyes and choke out, "And . . . that's . . . the way . . . it is."
Eryn might be the single witness, if only she'd wake up! I clamped my lips together and threw my voice, "Eehhnnnn!"
Then the beast lurched to attention, its legs in pounce position. I'd seen cats do that very thing before they attacked!
"MO-O-O-OM!"
"What!" my mom said as she entered my room.
She must have seen my terror. She hurried quickly to my bedside and, with one swoop of her hand, hurled the roach into the air. I feared its escape, but my mother was already committed. In a belligerent frenzy, she stomped the carpet, twirling and lunging and shouting obscenities. The hammers of destruction were her bright red Keds, and she crushed the beast like Rice Krispies under white rubber soles.
Snap, crackle, pop!
"You guys get out of bed now," my mother said, as if nothing whatsoever out of the ordinary had occurred. She then slipped into the bathroom and returned with a wad of toilet paper, entombing the carcass before flushing it down the toilet.
A fitting burial, I thought. Maybe upon seeing their kin washed through the poop chute with its body dismembered, the other roaches that lived down there would be too scared to venture into my room ever again.
Humming King of the Road, Mom departed without the cheers, fanfare, and confetti she so rightly deserved.
Eryn popped her thumb out, yawned and stretched, completely unaware of our close brush with the sinister shadow of sepsis. Just as well. A six-year-old thumb-sucker might not have handled it as well as I had.
From my memoir in progress: Growing Up Cockrill: Mostly True Tales of My Childhood.
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The Elusive Spirit of Christmas
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