1.
Dirk comes from the Midwest. He’s been here for about half a year, and it’s nice to have a midwestern sensibility across the table at lunch. When he talks about Michigan, he looks over at me, because he knows that I know what he’s talking about.
The other day Dirk was talking about a friend of his, about how this friend was thinking about moving to Texas, and how his girlfriend was willing to move, too.
“But Texas has big bugs,” Dirk said.
He told us that there was silence for a moment on the other end of the line.
And then his friend said, “Um, she doesn’t like bugs.”
2.
It was late. Everyone else was asleep. It was just me and the roach on the shelf. The very same roach that’s lately been wandering this place at night.
I stood there shoe-in-hand waiting for it to come into the clear, waiting to smash it.
But it didn’t come out. Instead it slowly strode among the books, across the tops of the pages and back behind them where I couldn’t see, and then back over the top again stopping to stretch.
It stood there on top of the books in some kind of luxuriating downward dog with six legs and two antennae, some splaying out, some stretching down, some quivering in the air about its brown, glistening body.
And it cast a shadow on the back of the bookshelf, a black, distorted shadow of a great hulking mass with biting jaws and snatching claws and flaying ropes swinging about it, a shadow that sent shivers down my spine.
But I stood there poised to swing. And I stood there while the whole house slept.
And then … SMACK!!!
I missed. And there was nothing to do but set down the shoe and go to bed.