Rando

 

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Chapter 1 - THE BASEMENT

In the damp, cool basement of an old house, under the warped wooden planks of a narrow and dangerous flight of stairs lived a family of cockroaches. They weren't the big ugly brown Asian variety, or the giant hissing kind from Madagascar. They were the shiny black German type, the ones with the smooth, oily-looking, ridged black shell. They didn't speak German or even look German; that was just the name given to them by humans who study bugs.

On a rainy afternoon while the human children who lived upstairs played and chased one another across the creaky hard wood floors, a mother cockroach watched as her eggs began to hatch.

From the eggs first emerged little antennae with which the tiny roaches felt around in their first efforts to observe their new world. The little bodies wriggled and turned, and then after a short struggle each crawled out and saw their mother.

She named them one by one.

"You'll be called Shadrack," she said to one. "And you're Mobly, and you're Lulu, and you're Beendee, and Stuluk, and Feberbarber, and Zanzabar, and Rando," and so on as they scurried by.

Stuluk, Rando and Feberbarber were hatched from three eggs their mother had deposited next to each other on the bottom of one of the stairs.

"I didn't expect the world to be upside down," exclaimed Rando.

"It's not upside down," replied Feberbarber, "I think we are.”

“Yeah, look over there!” exclaimed Stuluk. “There’s something to eat!”

Eating is mostly what cockroaches think about. If they’re not eating they’re thinking about where to find food. When they find food they’re thinking about how good it will taste, even if it’s something like poop that only roaches will eat. While they’re eating, they’re thinking about how much food they have left, and when they’re done they’re sad for a few seconds before they start thinking about where to find more. This eating business isn’t even something they have to learn because they have instincts that direct them. They have instincts that take control of them, and this is what sometimes gets them into trouble.

Rando and his brothers hadn’t yet learned that the house in which they’d hatched was both a wonderful place to find food and a terribly dangerous place for a roach to live. Given their instincts this was a combination of realities that meant that most of them wouldn’t live very long. But all the new roaches knew at this point in their young lives was that they were hungry and that there was something to eat. This moved them as though they had no voluntary control of their own bodies.

With antennae twitching they scrambled across the wrinkled wood while hanging upside down. This was another thing roaches are good at without even having to be taught – they can climb and run quickly, even upside down, across almost any surface. They descended the underside of the stairs surrounded by crowds of other recently hatched roaches and rushed toward their goal.

At the bottom of the stairs was a large bag of cat food. The opening at the top had been curled over and rolled up to keep the food inside fresh, but scattered in little heaps around it were bits of the cat kibble.

Rando scurried over two of his siblings, down the side of the bag, and across to one of the pieces. It was bigger than he was and so it didn’t even move when he attacked it with enthusiasm. He bit into it and felt a satisfaction that he’d never felt before. Of course he’d only just been born and hadn’t felt much of anything in his life yet, but he enjoyed it anyway. Soon the bit at which he ate was surrounded and even covered by other roaches.

“Come, children,” said his mother, “eat up. You have to eat while you can. The humans don’t like us much and sometimes they come down here to clean up the food. If it’s the boys, they like to hurt our kind.”

The little roachlings didn’t listen much, as they were distracted by the smorgasbord of cat food. But their meal was interrupted when the door at the top of the stairs suddenly opened with a squeak.

“Hurry!” shouted mother. “Hide!”

The light flicked on and one of the boys who lived upstairs came clunking down the stairs in his big basketball shoes. It was Stan, the younger one.

A voice called out from above and he stopped about half way down the steps.

“Mom, I’m down here looking for my Spiderman shirt. I wanna wear it to the park.”

The voice from above called out faintly. The roaches didn’t understand human speech, but if they could have they still wouldn’t have heard what Stan’s mother said because she was so far away.

“Mah-um!” Stan exclaimed in an irritated tone, “it isn’t that dirty!”

Roaches have other instincts in addition to the desire to eat. They also want to live, and whenever something big and scary starts coming their way, they know they’re supposed to hide. Even if they’re in the middle of a bite, as Rando was when Stan started down the stairs, they know they have to hide. And so Rando and his brothers ran as quickly as they could and hid under a heap of dirty laundry that piled high and stood over them like a mountain on the basement floor.

Rando hid as the clunking started again.

“Just a mih-nit!” Stan whined as he ran across the basement floor. He stomped on a scattering of kibble as he ran, crushing it to powder. His big hands began tearing apart the mound of soiled clothes, but deep inside it, as it burrowed into a subterranean mine, Rando and his brothers hid.

This was a curious place, Rando thought to himself. The fabric in which he hid was soft and damp, and smelled delightfully awful. He didn’t have any point of reference for comparison, but if he had been in existence long enough to have normal life experiences he would have likened the scent to a rancid onion mixed with old sweat and maybe even a rotten egg. But Rando didn’t yet know these pleasures so he simply enjoyed the smell in an unclassified state of ecstasy.

But then, much to Rando’s surprise, Stan reached the bottom of the heap and lifted the pleasant-smelling garment into the air.

“Here it is!” he shouted, his face contorted into a maniacal grin. But then the grin transformed into a grimace. “Eew! Sick! There’s a little roach on my shirt!”

The voice from upstairs called down again, this time closer and more urgent. Stan shook the shirt as a bullfighter shakes a cape. It snapped in the air and from it flew Zanzabar.

“Take that you little monster!” shouted Stan as Zanzabar struck the far wall of the basement and fell to the floor before trying to scramble again to the apparent safety of cover underneath a wad of dryer lint.

“Oh no you don’t!” Stan scolded. He stomped hard onto the lint and then, with his foot pressed down as hard as he could press it, he turned it from side to side as he smashed Zanzabar into the cold brick floor.

“Stan!” shouted the human mother from the top of the steps. “Get up here now! We’re going to your piano lessons!”

“I’m coming, mom!” Stan replied with feigned exasperation. “I just had to get my shirt!”

He pulled the befouled t-shirt over his head and ran up the stairs with the shirt covering his eyes. He stumbled clumsily and bashed his shin on the stairs and then regained his footing once the shirt was in place.

“Dang!” he shouted accusingly. “Stupid stairs!”

And with a click of the switch the light went out again and the door squeaked before it slammed shut.

“Don’t slam the door!” shouted the human mother from the pantry atop the stairs.

Sorr-ee!” shouted Stan. “Stupid door!”

 The basement fell silent. Seconds passed and then the roaches proceeded from their hiding places and returned to the cat food feast. They went straight to the crushed pieces first because these were the easiest to eat, but Rando held back.

His mother crawled over to him slowly. She was an old roach now, and not as fast as she once was. Her time was almost passed, her life’s mission of eating, growing, mating, and laying eggs having been accomplished. Her children surrounded her now and she surveyed them with a combination of pride and sadness. She knew that she would not live to see them grow up and find mates of their own, or to see grandroachlings scurrying excitedly for their first taste of cat food. But she knew too that most of her offspring wouldn’t survive to adulthood, and this also made her sad.

“Mother?” asked Rando.

“Yes, Rando?” she asked kindly.

“Is Zanzabar… dead?”

“Yes, son, he is. It’s a reality you’ll have to get used to as a cockroach. It’s why we have so many offspring. We live short lives and die easily. Especially when we’re around humans.”

“Why?” he asked.

She looked at him and stroked his head gently with her right antenna.

“Rando, the world is a difficult place to understand. But you’re a cockroach. You’ll adapt, I know it. Every litter has one – one smart one. I don’t know how to explain it, but do you see everyone eating now? Only seconds after your brother was smashed by that big human boy’s shoe?”

“Yes, I see,” said Rando, his appetite temporarily suspended by the remnants of the fear he’d felt when the boy tromped through the laundry pile.

“That’s what most of us do. We know danger when we see it, and then when it’s gone we go right back to eating and sometimes we get ourselves right back into the same kind of danger we were in before.”

“Why?”

She sighed as only a forlorn mother cockroach can. She rubbed her antennae together and leaned her head affectionately down toward Rando’s.

“That’s our instinct. But you’ll go far. You’ll survive, you’ll perpetuate the species. Someday you’ll find a female and you’ll understand. Your instincts will kick in and you’ll have roachlings of your own.”

Rando’s fear subsided and he scurried over to get a piece of the crushed cat kibble.

“Rando, let me explain a few things to you,” she insisted as she pursued him across the cold brick floor.

“Okay, but can I eat?”

She laughed. “Instincts,” she said knowingly.

Rando munched on a piece. It was delicious and much easier to eat when crushed into dust.

“Those humans have some use,” Rando said with his mouth full.

Mother’s laugh stopped instantly.

“Rando, the first lesson you must know is that the humans are extremely dangerous. We’re fortunate that one only took Zanzabar from us. I’ve seen him kill hundreds at a time.”

Rando paused his chewing. “Hundreds?”

“Yes, hundreds. The worst time was when we were all eating a frog on the driveway. The full grown human female drove her vehicle over it in the driveway. After it festered for a few days we discovered it and began feasting. It seemed that the whole nest went out there to eat. It was delicious!”

Rando didn’t yet understand the delights of festering animal carcasses. But he began to let his imagination roam as she described it.

“Dead animals are delicious! My favorite flavor is rodent, but an amphibian has a special pungency that reminds one of a rotten melon, or maybe a rotten melon with a hint of pigeon droppings.”

Now she was more wistful, as the recollection of these eating experiences reminded her simultaneously of happier times and the fact that she would never again have such pleasure.

“I can’t wait to try them,” said Rando, still munching the same piece of food.

Mother’s face went serious again.

“Yes, but while we were out feasting on the frog the bigger of those human boys came out. He said something in that loud and ugly voice of his and came over with a giant orange ball that I’ve seen him bounce on the pavement before.”

“What did he do with it?”

“He started bouncing it on us!” she exclaimed, the horror returning from the recesses of her memory to terrorize her once more. “Each bounce killed at least one of us! I’ll never forget how awful that was! Then the ball bounced onto the dead frog and he threw the ball away and began stepping on us. Those giant, awful shoes of theirs! It was simply dreadful!”

She fell silent for a moment and breathed heavily.

“Rando, I must teach you these lessons in character before I die. You seem to be the smartest, most thoughtful of your litter.”

Rando didn’t know the meaning of character, but it sounded interesting and potentially important. His antennae quivered and he took another bite. “Were you the smartest and most thoughtful in your litter?”

“Yes, Rando. I’ll teach these lessons to you, and you will teach them to your brothers and sisters. And then, someday, you will teach them to your own roachlings before you die.”

“Okay,” Rando replied, not fully comprehending the magnitude of the responsibility she was about to bestow upon him, but curious anyway. “Tell me what I need to know.”

And so she did.

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Chapter 2 - HUMAN FOOD

Rando grew into a large roachling. He wasn’t quite to the adolescent stage, but his legs were a little bit longer than they had been and his shell was starting to get darker. German cockroaches start out a light gray color and as they get older their shells darken and get shinier. The roaches with dark shells wore them proudly, and all of the little roachlings longed to grow up and have shiny black shells of their own.

In this respect they're not unlike human children who long to be grown up, and while they’re dreaming of being grown up they do everything they can to speed up the process. There were six human children in this house, the older three of which were old enough to know about some grown up things, the most interesting of which was money. They knew that money was something that one could use to get the things one wants to have. This wasn’t exactly the knowledge of the value of money their parents wanted them to have, but it was a start.

The eldest human was a loud female who came down into the basement every day to apply her efforts to defeating the seemingly infinite pile of laundry generated by the family. The two older boys were obligated to carry the laundry up and down the stairs for her. This was in addition to their other chores, this the result of a combination of forced chivalry and their parents’ misguided sense of equity.

Money was something grown up people always seemed to have, or at least something they had access to. The enterprising teenage boys in this household worked various jobs and earned money, though they weren’t very careful with it. They’d deliver newspapers in the mornings but spend half of their earnings on junk food, the remnants of which were sometimes found in the laundry to the delight of the roaches who tunneled under it.

One summer afternoon the second boy, Stan, carried a high-piled basket of laundry from the second floor of the old house down the two flights of stairs to the basement. As he did so, his sister, Millie, selected items appropriately similar to one another to qualify for sharing a load in the washing machine. She had the easiest of the three major chore categories because she was the only one of the children their mother would trust to properly do the job. The boys were careless and seemingly incapable of learning the rules. Light clothes were to be washed together. Some clothes couldn’t go through the dryer. Clothing couldn’t be left in the washer for a day or two or they’d get mildewed. There were so many rules that the human mother couldn’t trust the boys to get it right, and so Millie got the job. This suited her well, as it was not difficult work and she had discovered that it gave her a major financial advantage.

As she assembled a load of dark colored garments she sang an old song she’d heard on a musical movie in a voice imitating one of her favorite old-fashioned actresses. As she did so she dug through the pockets of a pair of pants she’d pulled from the pile. She laughed to herself as she withdrew from one of the pockets a crumpled five dollar bill.

“Hey, that’s mine!” exclaimed Stan as he came down the stairs,

“No, I get to keep any money I find in the laundry,” she claimed confidently.

“Says who?”

“Whom.”

“Who’s whom?”

“You’re supposed to say whom, not who. You sound dumb when you say that.” She slipped the money into her pocket.

“Gimme my five bucks! Those are my pants!”

They quarreled back and forth for several minutes, their voices growing louder as the arguments progressed.

“I have to do all of the laundry, so it’s only fair,” she insisted.

“No, I got that money on the paper route! It’s mine!”

“Finders keepers!”

“That’s my money. My money!”

“I’m the one who does the laundry. I don’t see how you can’t understand! It’s the most difficult chore, and I deserve to get paid for it.”

“No way it’s the hardest! I have to carry it up and down the stairs for you! All you do is put it in the washing machine! I have to vacuum the floors, every day, up the stairs and everything!” Stan’s voice grew more exasperated with each point he made, but it fell on deaf ears.

“Well you have the paper route, and it’s not fair because I don’t have any job.”

This argument didn’t make any sense to Stan, so he argued further until they were interrupted by a voice from upstairs.

“What’s going on down here? I’m on the phone and you two need to knock it off!”

It was their mother, of course, standing menacingly at the top of the stairs in her sweat pants and slippers, her hair wrapped in a towel and her head apparently tethered to a long, twisted and tangled cord. The cord in fact came from a telephone, but this was how Rando had always seen her when she’d peer from the first floor down into the basement and he thought the cord was part of her. Even though it was the two boys, Clarence and Stan, who were known throughout the entire cockroach community as the terrifying giants who killed, she scared Rando the most.

Ma-um, she has my money!” Stan shouted.

“Nuh-uuuh!” denied Millie as she slipped quickly past him and rushed up the stairs.

“Stop it!” their mother shouted.

Rando hid from the humans, his little legs clinging to the bottom of a step. Shadrack hung next to him as Stan galloped up the steps after his sister. The stairs shook and creaked but the roachlings held on.

“That’s my five bucks! Give it to me!” he insisted.

“I’m sorry Shirley I have to go,” said the mother. She laughed gently into the phone but her eyes revealed another emotion.

The door slammed behind Stan and the roaches could now only hear the voices through the door’s muffling barrier.

“Stop slamming that door!” the mother shouted, shifting instantly. “I’m on the phone!”

“Stupid door!” Stan charged.

“What do they do up there?” wondered Rando aloud.

“I don’t know why you’d wanna know that! You can’t be crazy enough to wanna go up there after them!” said Mobly. “The humans are upstairs, even those two bigger boys! They’ll smash you for sure if you go up there!”

Then past them crawled a bigger, older, wiser cockroach. He was fully grown, the biggest any of the brothers had seen. His time was nearly over. He’d lived a full life cycle and had survived it all. His offspring were all over the basement but he was going back upstairs for one more human food experience.

“You boys think it’s dangerous up there?” the old timer asked them.

“Yes,” replied Mobly, “mother says it’s very dangerous.”

The older roach nodded knowingly and rubbed his antennae together.

“Aye, it may be dangerous,” he said with a dramatic pause, “but the food is unbelievable.”

He stared silently into the dark expanse of the basement below, his quiet contemplation rhythmically assisted by the churning of the washing machine.

“What kind of food?” asked Shadrack.

“Human food.”

They all thought for a moment, the limitations of the roachlings’ imaginations preventing them from fully understanding him. They’d been eating cat food and funk from the dirty laundry pile since the day they’d hatched, and couldn’t even comprehend the idea of something even better.

“It’s food they drop on the floor. Humans have so much to eat they throw most of it into a giant box that’s lined with a bag. It’s perfect! All you have to do is get into it and you can eat forever!”

“What is human food like?” asked Rando naively.

“It’s a combination of foods. They eat something different every day. In fact they eat something different three times every day! It’s beautiful!”

“Won’t they notice we’re trying to eat it and smash us?” asked Mobly timidly. Clarence and Stan were up there, after all.

“We don’t have to be that bold,” replied the old-timer. “All we have to do is get under the kitchen cabinets and come out at night. You see, they all go to the second floor when it gets dark outside the house and they go to sleep. When the lights go out, we feast! That’s where I’m headed. I’m going to die soon, and I want to go out with a bang. If you boys want a good time, c’mon up! There’s more than enough for everyone!”

He ambled away up the stairs and left the three brothers to ponder his advice.

“Mom said never to go upstairs,” said Rando.

“I didn’t hear her say that,” replied Shadrack.

“I didn’t either,” said Mobly, “but if she did say that it was good advice. I don’t want to get stomped on. We have plenty to eat down here as it is!”

Rando remembered his mother’s advice.

“Don’t go upstairs, Rando. If you get greedy or curious about things you don’t need to worry about, it leads to danger. The day will come when you’ll be tempted to ignore this advice. You’ll want to go upstairs or outside or someplace else that’s dangerous, and you’ll be tempted to forget about me. When that day comes, ask yourself why you want to do it. Danger sometime has to be encountered, but if it’s unnecessary, if you don’t need to face it to survive, it’s not worth the risk.”

 Rando mulled this over for a moment as Shadrack started after the old roach along the underside of the stairs.

“Why are you going up there?” Rando asked aloud. He was asking himself, as per his mother’s advice, but Shadrack thought the question was for him.

“I want to try the human food!” he replied obviously.

Rando looked over at Mobly. “Let’s try it!”

Mobly’s antennae nervously twitched. “I don’t know, Rando. It sounds pretty risky.”

Rando knew that his plan was against mother’s advice, but his curiosity got the better of him. If the food was that good and that plentiful, and all he had to do was hide under the cabinets until after dark, how dangerous could it be?

“You’re probably right,” he admitted, “but aren’t you just a little bit curious?”

Mobly took two steps back. “No, I’m not curious at all!”

“C’mon you guys,” said Shadrack, now at least a foot ahead of them. “I can’t eat all the human food by myself!” The old timer heard this too and chuckled.

Mobly shook his head and turned away. “No way, not me!”

Rando abandoned his caution and scurried after Shadrack.

“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” he shouted ahead to his brother.

“Sure you do, you’re doing it for food!”

They climbed the stairs and shuffled across the stoop, their pace slowing as they approached the crack under the door from which a bright light emitted. To the roachlings it wasn’t a crack but a spacious pathway, broad and high-ceilinged, to the pantry beyond. Shadrack’s curiosity gave way to his fear now and he stopped completely. His antennae

“I dunno, Rando,” he hesitated. “This look scary. I’ve never been out of the laundry room before.”

Rando looked under the crack and saw a wooden floor that showed signs of age. It was old, in fact, as it was the original flooring in the pantry from when the house had been constructed and all its finish had been worn off. Decades of wear and moisture had left it rough and gray and stained, and something about it gave Rando a feeling of uneasiness. From the stoop he advanced, feeling the damp wooden slats under his feet as he snuck carefully under the door. Shadrack followed him.

From the other side of the pantry the old timer shouted back to them. “C’mon, you two, they’re going to have meal time soon! It gets dark pretty soon after that and they all go to bed. It’s a feast!”

“Didn’t he say it was safe to go up in the dark?” Rando asked his brother.

“Yes, that’s what he said,” Shadrack remembered.

“Well then where is that light coming from?”

They both realized that the light was bright, even brighter than the lights in the basement when the human boy and girl would come down to wash laundry.

“Hey, old timer,” Rando called out, “are you sure it’s safe? It looks pretty bright in here.”

From inside the pantry there was another door, just to the right of the basement door. This one led to the kitchen, though the young roaches didn’t know this yet.

But to everyone’s surprise the kitchen door suddenly opened and there, standing gigantic above them, was Clarence, the oldest of the brothers. He stood there in the kitchen, the kitchen door’s knob clutched in his left hand and a large, wet dishtowel in his right. He was looking to the right and not into the pantry as he tossed the dish towel to the pantry floor.

Rando and Shadrack watched, frozen in awe, as the sopping towel fell right on top of them with a thwap! It covered them completely and shielded them from Clarence’s view. The old timer, however, was not as fortunate.

 “Oh, sick!” said Clarence, another roach!” The little ones didn’t hear this, as it was the old timer to whom Clarence referred. The boy took a plastic dust pan that was leaning against the wall and brought it down with force onto the old cockroach who’d told the brothers about human food in the kitchen.

Underneath the towel the air around Rando was thick and damp, and moisture dripped from the crumpled cloth above him onto the old wooden floor beneath his feet. From what seemed a great distance away came a loud crashing sound and then a great slamming sound. These frightened Rando and drove him into a panic. He instinctively scurried straight ahead, unsure of his direction, until he emerged from underneath the towel. The kitchen door had been slammed closed and Shadrack was lost somewhere in the folds of the dishtowel, too far away to be seen or heard by Rando.

“Stop slamming that door!” shouted the human female adult from the other side of the door.

“Sorry!” Clarence yelled back. “Stupid door!”

But Rando’s concern suddenly shifted from his brother to the old timer they’d followed up the stairs. The old The black shell, once shiny and arched majestically over the roach’s back, was flattened and broken atop a splash mark of yellow-white goo that had been the elder roach’s innards only seconds before. One of its aged antennae fluttered slightly above the brushed body, as if to make a last silent protest. Rando realized that the first sound he’d heard must have been the human boy smashing his new friend. The old roach had gone out with a bang just as he’d asked, though it wasn’t quite what he’d had in mind.

Rando’s mouth gaped open in disbelief and his antennae shook madly in uncontrollable terror. He turned and burrowed back under the shelter of the dishcloth.

“Shadrack!” he shouted. “Where are you? That big human killed the old timer!”

Shadrack couldn’t hear him, though. Rando scurried left and right, crawling under the wet dripping folds and shouting for his brother every few paces. At length he grew weary of these efforts but was too panicked to stop. “Shadrack, where are you? I don’t want to be all alone in here!”

But there was no response. “I know I should have listened to mother!” Rando told himself aloud. “My curiosity, my greed! I should never have come up here!”

After wandering around, cursing himself and reminding himself to always follow his mother’s advice, he curled up and settled onto the floor. He was tired and scared and unsure what to do. There were tiny human food morsels stuck to the towel, and for a moment he forgot his predicament and began to eat. His instincts overcame his fears and soon he had almost forgotten his situation. He was a lonely, frustrated, terrified little cockroach stuck hiding under a towel in the pantry.

It never occurred to Rando that the towel wouldn’t remain in its place forever. The pile of laundry at the bottom of the stairs seemed to be permanent, and no matter how many times the humans came down to work on it the pile never got smaller. It seemed to Rando that the thing was just churned up and turned over from time to time. He couldn’t think of a reason for why this was, and it didn’t even occur to him that there should be a reason. Nevertheless, the towel under which he hid couldn’t stay there forever. It was due to be removed sometime when Stan came down to take the dirty laundry to the basement for Millie.

But there was another reason that laundry piled in the pantry got moved.

While Rando and Shadrack hid under the dish towel in the pantry, Dinner for the humans was served and consumed. Clarence then began working on his chores. He was responsible for setting and clearing the table, washing all of the dishes, and assisting his mother with preparation of the meals. On this evening he worked until just before it was time for bed. He cleared and washed the dishes, and then had an argument with Stan about crumbs being wiped from the table onto the floor after Stan had already vacuumed the dining room floor.

“I have to clean that up, you know! Why can’t you just wipe the crumbs into your hand?”

“I did!” Clarence insisted.

“No you didn’t I just saw it!”

“Knock it off, you two!” commanded their father. “Get your chores done and get to bed. We have to get up early again tomorrow.”

Clarence finished his work and then took a plastic cup over to the pantry. He opened the door and lifted the dishtowel he’d dropped their earlier.

“Ha! I found some!”

One moment Rando was resting comfortably under the shelter of the towel, but his comfort was suddenly transformed to terror as the towel was suddenly gone. He spotted Shadrack only a few inches away.

“Shadrack!” he shouted. His brother turned to look at him but a very large hand came down from above, its massive thumb and forefinger working quickly to snatch Shadrack from the floor by his antennae.

“Randoooooooo!” Shadrack replied as he was hoisted up and dropped, terrified, into the plastic cup.

Rando’s eyes followed Shadrack up and then he recognized Clarence, the cruelest of the brutish humans, crouched overhead. Clarence’s hand went down again and again, each time snatching another young roachling from the floor.

Rando ran as quickly as he could. Another towel, this one old and dry, rested in a heap a foot or two away.

But the nimble fingers of Clarence were too fast for Rando.

“Haha, you little punk, you think you can escape?”

Clarence hoisted Rando up to the level of his eyes while simultaneously standing upright from his crouch. “You’re mine now, little guy!”

Rando was dropped into the cup, his shell clattering against the side as he banged against it and slid to the bottom. Stunned, he looked around frantically and saw four other roachlings, including Shadrack.

He was now as surprised as he was scared, for they were all apparently safe and uninjured. They could feel the cup moving but all they could see overhead was the hand of Clarence cupped over the cup’s rim. The sides were too slick and steep for the roaches to climb it, so they had no way of knowing where they were or where they were going.

“What do you think he’s going to do with us?” Shadrack asked no one in particular.

“He’s going to smash us, that’s what they do!” exclaimed another.

“No, if he wanted to do that why didn’t he do it back there in the pantry?” replied Rando.  

No one had a good answer for this and so they continued to speculate until the cup suddenly tipped over and they all slid out.

For the second time in only a few minutes Rando had the sensation of falling. This time it wasn’t a few inches as it had been when Clarence had dropped him into the cup. This time it was much further, at least a foot and maybe further, before he landed with a clack! onto a surface with which he was not familiar.

Rando’s brother and the other roachlings landed with him and scurried all around instinctively in a search for shelter.

It was an uneven surface made up of small chips of wood. The chips weren’t small to Rando, as each one was larger than he was. He climbed atop one and felt around with his antennae.

“What a strange place this is,” he shouted over to Shadrack.

Rando looked around and could see what appeared to be a houseplant. The bark surface covered the entirety of a rectangular enclosure and was surrounded by great glass walls. Above him Rando saw Clarence slide a screen lid over the top.

“The human boy is closing us in,” said Shadrack.

“He’s closing himself out! That’s all I care about,” said one of the others.

Rando was uncomfortable out in the open. “You guys think we should find a place to hide? It seems pretty dangerous out here. We could get stomped if he takes that lid off.”

“I’m going to hide over there in that plant,” said another.

“Good idea,” said Shadrack.

Rando didn’t have any better ideas so he followed them as they scurried across the surface. They couldn’t move too quickly because they had to climb over the bits of bark. Shadrack was in the lead and they all followed him until he suddenly stopped.

“What is it?” asked Rando.

“I’m not sure, but it looks like a leg.”

Rando hurried over to where Shadrack pointed.

There below them, nestled down between bits of bark, was a leg that was longer than any of them. It was an insect leg, but it didn’t belong to a cockroach.

Rando grabbed hold of the leg and dragged it up to the surface where they could examine it more closely.

“How did it get here?” asked one of the others.

“How long has it been here?” asked another.

“What happened to the rest of him?” asked Shadrack.

“I dunno,” said Rando, “but it’s giving me the willies!”

“Me too!” said another.

“Let’s keep going. That plant looks a lot safer than being out here in the open with this dead leg!” Rando skipped over the leg and sprinted as fast as he could. He felt an urgency as his fear built up.

Did the human child torture and dismember insects in this enclosure? Did he feed them first? That would make it easier to live with, Rando thought, but he didn’t want to be pulled apart by a big mean human.

“C’mon,” he called out as he reached the base of the plastic plant container. The others hurried to his side.

The container was very shallow and appeared to be partially buried in the bark. The base of the plant was surrounded by soil inside the container. It was soft and moist and cool to the touch.

“This is like the basement,” said Shadrack.

“Yeah, I feel a lot safer in this shelter,” said another.

“Me too,” said Rando. He burrowed partially into the soil to rest and gazed up at the plant which towered above him like a tree.

“That plant looks so peaceful,” said Shadrack. “It’s so green and calm. If there’s food up in there we should live there!”

“There’s no food in a plant,” said Rando dismissively. “Why would there be?”

“Maybe the humans drop food there, too!” said one of the others.

“I’m not sure the humans actually drop food. That’s something the old timer said to tease us. And then he got smashed,” Rando replied.

It had been only a day in human time, but to the roachlings the time had been significant. Their life spans were short by comparison to humans, and their growth rate was faster. Since he’d followed the old timer up the stairs to the promise of a human food buffet, Rando had matured. He was now more skeptical, more cautious, and more circumspect.

Watching them through the glass was Clarence, his eyes staring attentively at the plant.

“Come on you guys, go up the plant!”

They couldn’t hear him, but they wouldn’t have understood even if they had.

“Clarence, lights out!” shouted the mother human from somewhere else on the second floor.

“Okay mom,” he replied. “Stupid bugs!” He took off his pants and threw them into a heap on the floor and then switched off the light and got in bed.

“The lights went out!” Shadrack exclaimed.

“Yeah, but we’re not in the kitchen,” said another.

“Tomorrow we should try to get out of these glass walls. If there’s no food in here we’ll all die,” Rando predicted.

“There’s gotta be food in here,” said Shadrack, “I’m willing to bet on it!”

“We’ll see,” said Rando.

He knew that this was one of those other situations of which his mother had spoken. Venturing out from under the plant and exploring the confinement was possibly dangerous. But this time he wouldn’t explore for the sake of his curiosity. It was for survival.

“I wish we were full sized,” said one of the other roachlings. “We’d be able to take care of ourselves better.”

The desire to be grown up. That was a sign of immaturity. Rando longed for the safer, more innocent days of his early youth. Hidden, well fed, and comfortable in the basement. Growing up has to happen sometime. For everyone.

“Let’s just hope we live long enough to enjoy being full sized,” Rando answered.

“Thanks for being positive,” said Shadrack sarcastically.

“You’re welcome,” Rando replied in kind.

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Chapter 3 - THE STRATOFORTRESS

The lights came on at a very early hour and Clarence’s father, the adult human, leaned into the room.

“Clarence, it’s time to get up. Stan’s already downstairs.”

“Okay,” Clarence mumbled in reply. “I’m coming.”

The boy sat up slowly from his bed and looked at his clock. 4:00 it read.

He slowly slid on his pants, the same pair he’d tossed to the floor the night before (in fact the same pair he’d worn each day for a week), and took a shirt from his drawer. He staggered to the door and down the stairs.

“The light’s on,” said Shadrack.

“Yeah, we noticed,” said Rando. He carefully peaked up over the rim of the plant container and twitched his antennae. There was nothing moving on the bark. The only sign of anything resembling life was the disembodied cricket leg they’d climbed over the day before which lay forlornly on the bark where they’d left it.

“Let’s go up in this plant and look around,” said one of the roachlings.

And so the group began to climb the plant. Rando scurried up one branch, his feet clinging to its underside, and onto a leaf. He climbed out onto the end and peered out over the expansive confinement.

“I don’t see anything, do you?”

No one answered him because they were all distracted with the scenery as they also took in the view.

“Maybe there’s food up this branch,” said one of the others. Rando looked over at him curiously as the roachling ascended a branch with a strangely shaped growth on it. The growth looked just like the branches, green and spindly, only it was extended along one of the branches. None of the other branches had a growth like that, he marveled.

“That’s weird,” said Rando aloud, and suddenly the growth moved.

In an instant, the ‘growth’ reached out with its great arms and snatched the roachling from the branch.

“What the…” began the roachling before being interrupted by the mouth of a praying mantis. The mantis tore the roach’s head completely off in the first bite, its mandibles holding the head in place as it chewed swiftly. The roachling’s body twitched and its legs squirmed frantically in an effort to break free, but the strength of the mantis was far too great.

“Shadrack, look out!” shouted Rando, but he was too far away to be heard. Shadrack continued to explore the branch on which the Mantis was perched as though there was nothing to be alarmed about.

The mantis devoured the first little roachling in seconds and turned its triangle-shaped head toward the movement its giant eyes and twitching antennae detected from Shadrack’s direction.

“No!” shouted Rando as he started towards Shadrack. He stopped suddenly as he realized that there was nothing he could do. He was a tiny roachling and that mantis was almost fully grown. It could easily eat an adult cockroach without any trouble at all. These roachlings were little helpless snacks.

Rando was helpless now and watched in terror as Shadrack scurried right up the branch and around it, first opposite the mantis and then right under it.

“Look, Rando,” he called out, “this one’s got a weird branch thing on it and…”

And wham! In an instant Shadrack was in the grasp of the mantis. The mantis started eating him from the other end. Shadrack’s legs were pinned under him and he struggled to escape, but his efforts were futile.

“Hey, Rando! I’m getting eaten! Run!”

Rando knew this was his only sensible course of action but it nevertheless angered and frustrated him. Shadrack was his brother, after all, and he didn’t want to leave him behind. But he was helpless.

“I was right!” Shadrack called out as the mantis ate his midsection. “I told you there was food in this tree! I just didn’t think I was it!”

Rando hurried down the plant as quickly as he could manage. One of the others passed him on its way up.

“You’re going the wrong way!” Rando shouted.

“No, I thought Shadrack said there was food up here.”

“There’s no food! Only danger!”

The roachling ignored him and passed, blindly rushing into the danger in hope of finding food.

Rando reached the soil and went over the lip of the plant dish. He ran frantically out onto the bark and scrambled away as fast as he could move. Shadrack was gone now and the great mantis was working on another of the roachlings as it cried out in terror:

“I was supposed to find food, not be it!”

Rando couldn’t help. But where could he go? He scanned the surface of the confinement but could see no shelter. Then he remembered something.

“That leg!” he exclaimed. The leg hadn’t been eaten by the mantis, and they’d found it buried under the bark. That meant there was room underneath – maybe even enough for a little roachling to hide.

Rando burrowed into the bark. He dug as quickly as he could, the sounds of his friends crying out for help filling the air behind him. He tunneled until he got to the bottom of the tank. It, too, was made of glass and its surface was covered by dust from the layer of bark that slowly decomposed and crumbled above. There was some moisture down here, but nothing much to eat.

Roaches don’t really have much in the way of emotions. They love their families, of course, but they’re so accustomed to seeing their kind get smashed and eaten that it doesn’t take very long for them to move on. For Rando, he soon got past his initial shock at the demise of his brother and friends and his thoughts turned to his stomach. He explored for a considerable time, feeling his way along the dark and dusty tank bottom until he reached a wall. The light was low but his antennae were able to aid him as he forged a path.

There was some food down here at last. It was a clod of greenish mash, a type of food used in the packaging and shipment of live crickets for pet feeding. On occasion Clarence purchased crickets from a pet store and had dumped them directly from their packaging into the confinement with the mantis. Each package contained a small lump of food for the crickets that was very similar to stink bait used by humans for fishing. Rando had no idea where it came from but it was something he could eat and enjoy. It was quite delicious! He was very hungry and ate it as quickly as he possibly could. It had been several human hours since he’d last eaten but to Rando it seemed like a lifetime.

The confinement rested atop a dresser pushed against one of the walls of the bedroom. All five of the brothers in this house shared this room. Two pairs of brothers slept in bunk beds and the fifth had his own bed over in the corner. All of them were out of the room at this time, but the floor was strewn with evidence of their sloth. Clothing rested in piles amid toys, books, leftover newspapers and trash. The human mother called it a “disaster area.”

From Rando’s perspective, however, it was clear that human beings nested in piles of clothing. The basement was one nest that they came to from time to time and apparently liked to stir and remodel, but this nest was the boys’ lair. The bunk beds were battered and marred. Crayon marks, carvings and dents covered the wooden posts and planks upon which the mattresses rested. The mattresses were lumpy because underneath them the boys had their only individual storage spaces and stored miscellaneous items including knives, toys, books, loose papers, baseball cards, and the like. An alarm clock sat on the dresser next to the mantis tank next to a large sack of rubber bands.

From the ceiling in the room dangled a dozen or so plastic model airplanes. In one corner was a formation of fighter jets, an F-16 Fighting Falcon, an F-15E Strike Eagle, and an F-4 Phantom. A fourth American fighter, an F/A-18 Hornet, was frozen in an action sequence peeling away from the formation in pursuit of a Russian MiG-29 Fulcrum. These models represented hours of painstaking effort on the part of Clarence and Stan, though the workmanship did not reflect this effort. Smeared globs of dried glue were frozen in place where they had oozed from the seams of plastic parts after excess application. Decals of Air Force insignia identified the aircraft but through the haze of fingerprints. Missiles were slung crookedly from underwing mounts and, wherever possible, the original plastic showed through because the color in which it had been molded was ‘close enough’ for the boys’ taste.

Despite their unartful appearance, these models were a source of pride to the builders. The most impressive of the fleet was a large B-52 Stratofortress. It hung in glorious splendor, its bomb bay doors swung open wide in menacing threat to the imaginary targets that occupied bunkers and military machinery far below. This model was Clarence’s favorite. At a scale of 1:72, the strategic bomber had a wingspan greater than two feet. It had been painted in a beautiful camouflage pattern and dangled from three strong strands of clear fishing line which was secured to a steel hook eye that was embedded in a rafter through the ceiling plaster. An astute observer, on close inspection, could see the crew seated in her cockpit, each detail of their helmets and the control panel at which they sat painted in careful if not perfect detail.

She was also the favorite of Clarence’s curious younger brother, Bevin. Bevin was only eight years old and his was one of the top bunks. Clarence, ever cautious with the placement of his model aircraft, had dangled the B-52 from hooks in the ceiling that were sufficiently distant from Bevin’s bunk that he was unable to reach it. The distance and beauty of the magnificent Stratofortress drew Bevin. Forbidden toys, for that is what these models were to him, were far more enticing than those with which he was expected to play.

For reasons adults cannot explain but which in regrettable retrospect can be speculated, Bevin’s desire to play with the B-52 on this day compelled him to take risks.

While Stan was vacuuming the upstairs hallway, the human mother was talking to her friend Christie on the telephone. Millie played a piano. Clarence was downstairs in the kitchen, washing the dishes from breakfast.

The other two little boys were occupied watching a cartoon on the television in the living room, but it occurred to Bevin that it would be delightful fun to play with the majestic bomber. He ascended the stairs and climbed over the cord and tubes from the shop vac, slipping past Stan and traipsing carelessly down the hall and into the boys’ room.

Bevin stood under the B-52 and stared up at it. He looked from it to the rest of the room, sizing up the obstacles and looking for something to stand on that would elevate him sufficiently to allow him to reach it.

He climbed up on to the dresser. He slipped because he was wearing socks and the surface was smooth, but he managed to catch himself as he kicked the bag of rubber bands onto the floor. Some spilled but the mess disappeared into the sea of clutter that hid most of the carpet from view.

He walked over to the mantis tank and pushed it to the far end of the dresser. The lid of the tank had attached to it a florescent lamp that ran the length of the cage and allowed observers to see the insect in action. The bulb was burned out at this point, but the lamp was still in its place and served as a platform for Bevin now as he climbed upon it. The plastic lamp housing was just strong enough to support his weight as he carefully walked over to the edge and reached for the bomber.

It was just beyond his reach. Undaunted, Bevin climbed back down from the mantis tank and onto the dresser. He stepped into one of the open drawers and leapt from there onto a crumpled shirt. He slipped out of the room and past Stan who was still vacuuming the hallway.

“C’mon, Bevin, stay out of the way! I’m cleaning the floors!” Stan shouted above the high-pitched whine of the shop vac.

Bevin skipped past and ran down the stairs and into the front hallway by the door. The cat saw him coming and, hearing the thunder of his descent, bolted for the safety of darkness under a bench that sat under the stairs.

He ran into the dining room and turned, slipping again on his socks across the hard wood floors. He fell down with a crash and immediately got up.

“Stop roughhousing!” shouted the mother, her voice elevated to a volume louder than usual to clear the noise of the piano, the television, and the vacuum cleaner.

Bevin ran through the living room and into the library from which he removed three volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia. They were the thinner of the books in the collection. At his size he couldn’t carry the thick ones, though the A or S volumes would have been helpful and might have added an inch or two to his reach.

For reasons adults cannot explain but which in regrettable retrospect should have prevented, no one noticed him as he struggled through the living room, the dining room, and the front hallway with his arms full of books. His mother sat in the dining room and chatted with her friend on the phone.

“I heard that Shirley is going to picket in front of the funeral home!”

Bevin dropped the U volume and then, in an effort to pick it up he dropped the others.

“It’s because she’s tired of them shining those bright floodlights across their parking lot and onto her house all night long.”

Bevin re-assembled his stack. Stan was now descending the stairs with the vacuum cleaner in hand. Clarence dropped a pan in the kitchen and it clanged loudly on the floor.

“That’s what I told her,” mother continued, unaffected.

Bevin lifted the stack and struggled up the stairs with it.

“How many times do I have to tell you to get out of the way?” Stan asked, unconcerned with the encyclopedias.

Bevin said nothing and continued on his mission, visions of the strategic air command flying through his mind with Bevin himself at the controls. He smiled fiendishly as he slipped into the bedroom where he again reached the dresser and heaved the books to its surface. He climbed the drawers again and then stacked the encyclopedias on top of the mantis tank one by one and watching to see if they would break the lid and fall into the confinement.

On the first floor, Clarence had finally completed his chores.

“Mom, I want to go play pitcher-batter outside, can we do it now?”

“Yeah,” Stan added, “I just finished the floors.”

Mother’s face contorted into a frustrated but silent grimace. She waved her hand wildly, her charade violently and silently flailing the message that she wanted them to go away.

“Yes, they keep the lights on all night, and they’re shining right across the parking lot. I don’t know why Skip won’t do anything about it.”

It was a thing of beauty, a phenomenon that caused the boys to marvel. She looked so annoyed at them, as though she’d just sucked the juice from an unripe lemon. Her face conveyed a message of danger, her free arm warned them to keep away, and yet her voice was pleasant and happy. The listener on the other end of the line had to think she was bubbling with joy.

They didn’t linger to clarify the meaning of her gestures. They galloped away, Stan going straight for the door and Clarence going to the stairs.

Pitcher-batter was a simplified form of baseball, improvised for only two players. Someone pitches and someone bats. The front steps of the porch outside made for a perfect backstop, though the boys had learned to use a tennis ball instead of a baseball after shattering the front window with a foul ball. From time to time a ball would go into the street, but that was a risk, a condition of the field, to which the boys were accustomed.

“My glove is upstairs,” Clarence explained, “I’ll be right out.”

In the boys’ room, Bevin had not yet reached the B-52. Even perched atop the encyclopedias which were stacked on top of the mantis lamp atop the mantis tank, he was still a few inches short of reaching it. He climbed back down and pushed the mantis tank even further, its end now suspended over the edge of the dresser. To Bevin, this seemed a perfectly safe platform from which to accomplish his goal.

Clarence came down the hallway, the sound of his footsteps startling his little brother. Just as Clarence came through the doorway the mantis confinement tipped on end, turning over and falling from the edge of the dresser. Bevin desperately grasped the nose of the B-52 as the glass Mantis tank shattered on the floor right at Clarence’s feet.

The nose of the B-52 tilted forward and Bevin, for a very brief instant, stared into the face of the tiny plastic pilot as the strands of line from which the aircraft was suspended snapped under the weight. Bevin fell to the floor, landing directly on top of the spilled mantis container, his sock-clad foot crushing the startled mantis beneath his weight.

The Stratofortress slipped from his grasp, spiraling in a death spin before it impacted, left wing first, into a small square of floor uncovered by clutter and hard and unforgiving.

Clarence watched in horror as his masterpiece buckled with the impact, the wing for a valiant moment threatening to withstand the force before giving way and breaking cleanly from the fuselage. The nose crashed down next, ejecting the pilots from the broken windshield and dislodging the cluster of bombs from the right wing.

“BEVIN!” he shouted. The younger brother looked up at Clarence, his eyes wide and his mouth agape. He was in trouble and scared and sorry all at once. His knee had suffered a rug burn but he had miraculously escaped the razor sharp shards of the glass mantis tank but his lip quivered as he looked up at his brother.

From the first floor it was the sound of the shattering glass that pried mother from the telephone.

“Christie, I have to go!” she said and hung up abruptly. “What happened up there?!” she shouted in the shrill tone only an angry and concerned mother can muster.

“BEVIN DESTROYED MY B-52 AND MY MANTIS TANK!”

As the human crisis unfolded above him, Rando found himself liberated from the insect habitat. The upheaval had surprised him and had knocked his deliciously noxious cricket feed from his grasp. He scrambled instinctively away from the wreckage and toward the relative safety of someone’s discarded clothing. As he crawled over the mixture of glass shards, dirty socks, and bark, he came face to face with the triangle head and bulging eyes of the mantis.

For a moment he thought he’d escaped death only to find it again in the mandibles of the green monster, but after a moment he noticed that it was quite motionless. The once fearsome arms of the predator were crushed, crumpled pathetically under its thorax. The green, formerly bulging abdomen was mashed and oozing bug guts.

Rando gasped. “They smash mantids too?”

But the larger human boy raged on above him and Rando feared a crushing stomp of his own. He ran quickly into what appeared to be a safe place, a green cavern of smooth plastic. It was the fuselage of the downed B-52.

“This model kit cost me fifty dollars!” shouted Clarence. “Do you have any idea how long it took me to build this?!”

“He’s only eight, Clarence, it was an accident,” said mother calmly. “Stan!” she suddenly changed voices again. “Bring up the shop vac!”

“He’s outside,” said Millie, eyeing the disaster with gleeful satisfaction from the hallway.

“Go get him,” mother ordered.

Clarence scooped up the wreckage of his B-52. “I can’t believe you!” he said to Bevin as the boy skipped carefully around the mess and into the hallway and to the safety of mother’s sympathetic and comforting arms.

Stan came up the stairs, shop vac in hand. “What in the world?” he marveled at the sight of Clarence’s B-52.

“Bevin!” Clarence exclaimed.

Everybody who has a brother knows that they can really be handy. They can help you with your chores, even if your parents have to force them to. They can provide you, unwittingly, with a stream of income if you’re enterprising enough to find it.

They’re there to play with, too, if you can get your chores done and sneak away from your mother’s watchful eye. They can even tell you when mother is on the phone and distracted. But because they’re brothers they’re not always your ally. Sometimes they can pass unnoticed, their mischievous motives concealed from all but the marginally concerned. They can sabotage your favorite things, kill your pet mantis and make such a huge mess that you have to do even more chores before you can go outside. And if they’re young enough and cute enough, they can even escape punishment for doing these things to you and learn that their only mistake in trying to get to your precious things is to fail.

But as Rando learned, these kinds of problems were merely trivialities, insignificant trifles on the scale of troubles caused by brothers. Brothers can convince you to ignore your mother’s advice. They can get you eaten, stepped on, lost, or maybe all three. Rando contemplated these things as Clarence carried the B-52 parts back to the basement to a plywood and sawhorse table used by the boys to build models. This was a safe place for a cockroach, a place from which he could slip quietly when the lights went out and return to the happy abundance of spilled cat kibble.

“Thanks, Shadrack,” Rando whispered. He’d almost been killed several different ways, but in the end he had a ride in a B-52 and ate a clod of funky cricket food. He’d lost a brother, but he’d had a great adventure. In the life of a cockroach, that wasn’t a bad tradeoff.

 

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Chapter 4 - KIRBY

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Chapter 5 - DUCT TAPE

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