Retiring to my place of abode late one afternoon, I sat down in my easy chair for an after lunch siesta. My place is part of Catherine’s house, though it seems not so. It is a room set apart from the main part of the house, though sharing the roof and a common section of wall. A little porch, once occupied by the dog Jay, separates the room from the rest of the house, thus providing a bit of privacy and insulating it from sounds in the house, and vise versa. The porch faces the back yard which is home to Toy-Toy the orange tree, and closer in, a long-neglected bunch of overgrown sucker sprouts of crepe myrtle known to me as the trash tree. I maintain the tree deserves that name because it constantly drops leaves onto the patio table that sits under it, and its blossoms are so high one must strain his neck to see them. 

When my eyes adjusted to the light in the room I noticed a black thumb-sized object on the floor, which I took to be a dead leaf from the trash tree tracked in by my unsuspecting foot. As I reached down to pick it up the darned thing moved. I realized at once that it was no leaf, but a cockroach, likely second only to the mosquito the world’s most despised insect. I have seen women in our kitchen turn vicious upon spying a brother to my visitor, removing a shoe and swatting mightily at it until a small pile of guts and eyes was left on the floor. I lifted my foot expecting to see a squirming degutted insect on the floor. Nothing. In inspected my shoe sole. Still nothing. A moment later the little varmint emerged from under my desk, stopped, looked my way and waved his antenna at me and after a brief pause, disappeared under some out of sight thing on the floor.

It was then that I remembered being awakened just a few nights ago by a flying object bouncing off the wall over my head and landing in my hair. I brushed it off with my hand and went back to sleep. It might have been a dream I thought; but now I was sure it had happened. 

A few days later my little buddy showed himself again. He seemed to be shy, not coming to within my easy reach. Nevertheless he showed himself in several places, each time giving me a friendly wave of his antenna before exiting my view. In the following days he repeated his performance, coming ever closer to me, and I became accustomed to his antics. I decided to claim him as a pet since I had no other.

I made the mistake of telling Catherine of my pet. She came to visit me with a roach poison and hid it in a corner where I couldn’t see it. I saw only one roach performance after that. Evidently the poison food did its intended job. I expect my next encounter with my former pet will be a scene of a poor dead body lying on its back, legs extended skyward. Is it fair to deprive an old man of his odd pleasures?