I got up in the middle of the night for a glass of water and when I turned on the light, a ton of them scattered.
Holy shit there were a lot.
German cockroaches.
That’s what they were.
Learned that later with some research.
But at the time they just looked like crickets.
Except not good.
Bad crickets.
Big ones, small ones.
It was a mess.
I watched them scurry toward cracks where the curled linoleum missed the baseboards.
Or beneath the fridge.
Into cabinets.
Into outlets.
Like something in reverse.
One was crawling over a glass in the sink.
And so, forgoing the water, I retreated to my room.
To prepare for war.
Early the next day, the building manager and plumber came by.
They inspected the pipes every winter.
Did we wake you up?
Ha, no.
I was in a paint-stained hoodie and sweatpants, half a boner left, hair sticking up.
Barefoot.
The plumber went to check the bathroom.
Building manager told me some shit about fixing the parking lot, some new online app thing too.
She began to fawn over my cat, petting him as he threw his side into her legs.
His eyes were halfway closed and he was licking his lips rapidly—just about to bite her—when she stood.
Asked me if everything else was good, did I need anything, had I seen any bugs . . .
“Bugs?”
“Yeah like cockroaches, bedbugs.”
“No.”
The moment swelled.
“Wait, yeah actually I saw a few the other day. Here and there.”
Another long pause.
The last of my boner dissolved.
“Nnnnnlike . . .” she said, doing a juggling motion and looking up toward the ceiling. “Crickets? Ants? Whatta we talkin?”
What, am I the fuckin bug guy now?
What is this.
And how did she know . . .
“I don’t know, I’ll keep an eye out and let you know.”
“OK well, let us know if you see any,” said the plumber, stomping back into the room, “and you’ll see me again.” He thumbed himself and nodded with a confident, dutiful look on his face. Then he smiled. He had the zeal of a man recently hired. Plumber and exterminator and any other “er” they needed. “We’ll take care of that, don’t even worry.”
And I believed him.
The building manager smiled and said they’d try to get me a different oven too, gesturing toward mine because the door was hanging off.
[They never did.]
I had fixed it with rubberbands but now that was failing as well.
“Thanks.”
“You’re paying for it,” said the plumber, “why the hell not.”
“Yep.”
“OK bye-bye,” said the building manager. “Bye-bye cutie,” she said to my cat.
He meowed at her in a yelling/angry way.
I closed the door behind them and looked around the kitchen, the livingroom.
Silent but swarming with the enemy.
My walls, teeming.
I imagined one scouting with binoculars, from high atop a cabinet.
I was cornered.
Infested.
But no I wasn’t gonna tell Management.
Fuck Management.
This was crossroads connecting.
Enemies, destinies.
Poured into each moment with perfect reason.
Fuck Management.
I’m Management.
So that night I checked again.
Had to.
Like I didn’t want to delude myself.
I had to see it.
And there they were.
There they fucking were.
Scattering again.
Of course—I thought—if I’m seeing them at all, there’s tons.
They’re never just “here and there” like I said before.
It’s not like a couple vacationing.
There had to be tons and tons.
At this point they’d probably established rudimentary governments, verging on nuclear capability.
Space programs.
I realized that—in addition to whatever natural disposition my building had to bugs, like the giant gaps in the flooring and cabinets, as well some of the plumbing leading to literal dirt/outside—leaving cat food out wasn’t helping.
A number of them scattered from the bowl.
There was what seemed like, to my still sleepblurry eyes, a giant one—some deep-hive queen they brought out when an area was secured.
I genuinely thought they’d advanced a larger, more esteemed member of their overall population as a sign of victory.
Taking over, progress.
But then I focused and saw it was just a shred of cat food with a couple roaches on it.
Anyway, real or not, that was what did it.
I’d had it.
This imagined affront of some biological victory float, this was enough.
I saw a roach on the counter, looking at me like hehe what.
Antennae moving in circles.
So condescending.
A greasy, terrible, alien-like cricket, looking for . . . what?
A few crumbs?
Fuck you!
I snapped out of my daze and started killing.
Smashed the roach on the counter with a papertowel.
(Yeah, I had papertowels, bitch).
Grabbed this bleach-based cleaner I had in a spray bottle.
Fiff fiff, let off a few in the direction of one still looking for a crack.
Another one paused in the middle of the kitchen floor, fiff fiff, it ran for a second then flipped over and writhed, dying.
Pumped its legs in slower pulses.
Yeah fuck you too.
Smashed a couple more in the sink.
Antennae circling slow as they perished in their own juice.
I mean I was crafty.
Even early on, I rarely lost a hog.
“Hog” being slang for when they freak out.
Because when they sensed danger, their movement changed.
They went hog on ya.
I caught a couple in quick succession with the papertowel.
Legs smeared on the counter.
Threw the papertowel out and went to reload but saw a big one and hit it with a marker I had nearby.
A stunning direct-hit even while hoggin.
The roach stopped abruptly then continued on in little lurches, like something with a triangular wheel.
I pressed my finger onto a small one looking for escape on the counter.
Sprayed some as they entered a crack in the flooring.
When I moved the coffee maker, a bunch scurried.
So I sprayed, smashed, repeat.
Wiped up bodies.
But there were always more.
Yeah, standing there holding the bleach and my white rag of death, I realized I was meeting the problem at a point of the problem’s choosing and not my own.
I mean this wasn’t some movie stuff, where they’d work in tandem to comb my hair or make my bed, make food, etc. sing me songs as I cleaned them with a toothbrush in my sink or some such thing, no.
This was real life.
And violence, the solution.
Endeavoring war only at the border of coexistence, that’s denial.
Meeting them where they were.
Which, to be fair, was only the kitchen.
I will admit that at first I was lulled by this treatise, them remaining in the kitchen and not anywhere else in the apartment.
Yes for a moment, this recognition of boundaries had me feeling some sick respect for them.
Some vague appreciation, beginning on a negative.
Hey, at least you didn’t infest ALL of my apartment.
Because it would be the bathroom and my room next.
And then, in all likelihood, the world.
And there I go again being the damn hero.
But first I had to do some research.
I went to the coffee shop in town the next morning to regroup.
Looking for answers, looking for something, but what?
That’s when I found out the fuckers were German roaches.
[Dropping manila envelope with case files/mugshots on police chief’s desk.]
German roaches.
Wouldn’t ya know it.
I paused between sips of black coffee to stare tired-eyed out the coffee shop window, at the quiet street, absorbing this new reality, the infester, an enemy.
Which now had a name.
The German cockroach.
From my studies, I gathered they could live off soap and shit, like toothpaste, or just water left in the sink.
Goddamn.
The German cockroach is the most common cockroach and one of the more common infestations. German cockroaches are serious pests that can put you and your family at risk. They spread diseases like salmonella and ruin food. These resilient insects are experts at scavenging for crumbs and leftovers. They’ll quickly build colonies in apartment buildings and houses if the resources are there. They’re unable to survive away from humans.
I envisioned one looking through my mail.
Brushing its teeth at my kitchen sink.
I saw one wearing my clothes.
Wasn’t immediately clear whether it would be a situation where my clothes were smaller and fit the roach, or just my normal-sized clothing moving across the floor, with only the roach’s head sticking out.
They said the best way to get rid of them is to make it a not-welcome place.
Clean a lot, nothing resembling food out at all.
I found someone had—via a search engine’s recommendations—already popularized the search “why are German cockroaches the worst.”
And indeed, they were.
Man, were they.
I looked out through the window again, across the street, and saw a roach doing the throat slicing with finger move, disappearing as a car passed by.
Where Do German Cockroaches Come From? The German roach is easily transported. It can catch a ride in your grocery bag. Eggs are attached to things and then hatch in the new destination. Cardboard, clothing, etc. Inadvertently introduced into your pantry or your kitchen cabinets. Given a choice, they’ll opt for sweets, grease, starches, and meat. When food is scarce, however, they’ll eat anything from pet food to soap to hair to excrement to glue.
There were pictures of adults and babies.
The babies were called nymphs.
Pictures of the egg sac, which was called an ootheca.
Which looked like a small piece of graham cracker.
The females carried them on their back beneath their wings.
German roaches can’t fly either.
Because they’re the worst.
Couldn’t even survive without humans in a temperature-controlled environment.
Living on crumbs, soap, toothpaste, and in dire situations, each other.
In famine conditions, they turn cannibalistic, chewing at each other’s wings and legs.
Eating out the dead shells of their brethren, like so much forbidden lobster, my god.
There was an icon of a roach—bird’s-eye view—in a crosshair, above some facts.
I scrolled a little more, mindlessly, about to close the website when I saw the word “blattellaquinone.”
Blattellaquinone.
The sex pheromone of the German cockroach.
It said their presence, with high infestation, carried a musty odor.
Which was their fuckjuice.
Which accounted for the smell when I checked beneath the sink.
Ah, blattellaquinone, that’s what it was, yep.
Saying that to the person next to me at the coffee shop, pocketing my phone.
Roach fuckjuice, ah that’s what I was smelling OK.
Blattellaquinone.
Man.
Sex parties on my fucking dime . . .
Salmonella . . .
Oothecae . . .
Fuck all of that.
No.
I wasn’t having any of it.
On the walk home, I re-upped on papertowels and bleach spray, and passed my friend Mack’s shop, needing the advice of a seasoned warrior.
But I saw he was showing someone a shotgun, so I kept walking.
On a mission anyway, fuck it.
Mack and I will meet again in the afterlife.
That night, it was nonstop carnage.
I set my alarm for 3am and flipped the lights on, ambush.
Quickly sprayed down the sink, which was full of them, then grabbed my bludgeon and began bopping.
I’d fashioned a striking object out of an empty papertowel roll, with a taped handle.
Crimped and taped the top too, for durability.
My bludgeon of many-kills.
Quicker than the papertowel for that initial rush.
I smashed a bunch on the counter.
Bop bop bop.
Whittling away at their numbers.
It was a numbers game, really.
Followed some scurriers back to major cracks, which I taped over with packing tape.
I put packing tape around outlets too.
Discovered a makeshift camp beneath the crockpot.
They scattered.
I set the crockpot down on one by accident, smashing the back half, leaving the front half intact and pleading forward.
Hardwired to continue.
To go.
But it was not to be.
This is the end for you, my friend.
Goodbye.
I killed as many as I could and when everything cleared, I decided to stay up and discourage scavengers.
Because it wasn’t gonna end with small measures.
So I grabbed my .308 and patrolled the kitchen.
Practicing raises/dry firing here and there.
I’d bought the rifle off Mack a couple months ago and he told me the real lessons are learned dry firing.
Gun up/arm out, aim, work the bolt, pull the trigger, tsik.
It was a cheapo rifle but, for whatever reason, it was the only time I’d heard Mack express jealously toward a firearm.
Scout rifle in .308, carbine length, mag fed, iron sights, and rail for scope.
Designed for be a do-all gun for a single soldier on any given mission.
Light enough to carry but plenty of firepower if needing to engage.
I saw a roach crawling up the wall and killed it with the butt of the stock.
I woke late the next day in my chair, lights still on in the kitchen.
My .308 leaned against the wall.
I made coffee, doing some more research.
Technical research, if you will.
What to do.
The right course.
It said I had to locate and destroy the nests.
Nests are often found behind refrigerators, in kitchen cabinets, crawl spaces, in corners and other compact places. Telltale signs of a nest include mounds of cast skins, egg cases, dark spots or smears, and live or dead cockroaches.
Smears . . .
Anyway, the problem had to be rooted.
An unwelcoming.
I sipped my coffee and checked the areas I’d taped up.
There were bodies, legs, antennae in the tape.
Poppy-seed-looking things, which was their shit.
I swept around the fridge and oven and found a number of dead shells.
Dumped the dead shells into the garbage and waited for sundown . . .
Which in Michigan in December was 4pm.
That night, I went after the nests.
Pulled the fridge out.
A ton of them scattered.
It was the most I’d seen.
I swear I could hear the sounds they were making in the ear-ringing silence of the kitchen.
A sort of dry clacking sound.
The room condensed around me.
Mesmerized by the fuckjuice.
But I shook it off.
Bleached the inside of the back of the fridge, where the internals were exposed.
Fiff fiff fiff.
A bunch more came out, including a number with (licking lips, impossibly evil rasp) delicious oothecae on their back . . .
They popped a certain way if you got them just right.
The egg carriers.
I’d found a nest.
Tons of nymphs emerged.
But I drowned them with the bleach spray.
My spray-finger, cold and true.
I sprayed some bleach into the back area of the fridge again.
A couple more came out.
I smashed them with my bludgeon.
Bop bop.
Juice exploded out of them and they went to god, there on the kitchen floor.
I set down my bludgeon and inspected the back of the fridge again.
There was a deep bush of lint and fur and whatever else over the engine(?) grate.
So I sprayed it down good.
And the lint wetted and sagged.
Roaches came out.
Crawling out of the soaked lint.
The smell was terrible.
A musty, deathly odor.
A taunting cologne . . .
When I moved the oven out, same thing.
I sprayed the entire kitchen floor and wiped it, dumping heaps of folded and soiled papertowels (bought the nine-pack, bitch) in the garbage.
The garbage can, piled with papertowels besmeared with random body parts.
A monument to Death.
I mean they didn’t ask.
If I’d heard a knock at the door and opened it and saw all of them there, with one in front, hat in hands, toeing the ground sheepishly, asking for shelter, I would have gladly taken them in.
I’m saying this in all honesty.
That would have been no problem.
But they just started in on my shit, with their fuckjuice.
And I wasn’t having any of it.
When I finished cleaning, I sat in my chair again, ready for another long night.
Practicing raises with my .308.
Raise/arm out, aim, work the bolt.
Tsik.
I remembered a text from Mack that I hadn’t responded to.
It said to come down to the shop, he’s got the stuff I wanted.
For trimming .308 brass.
It was getting late, but in the winter he was always there.
I set the rifle down beside my chair and got dressed.
When I left my apartment, it had just begun snowing.
Big flakes.
The OPEN sign blinked at Mack’s, behind the steel grates covering the windows.
Inside, him and some other old man were laughing, standing with their hands in coat pockets, near a propane heater.
Hunting and fishing gear lined the walls.
The guy wore a hat that said he was a veteran of Vietnam.
Mack had a pretty (I must say) preppy new winterhat, but the front of his coat was still smeared with dirt/grease/solvents.
Oversized jeans and velcro shoes.
Gray moustache waxed at the ends.
“Alright then, addy ohs, I’ll be seein ya,” he said. “Stop by Tuesday then and I should have that ready for ya.”
“OK then, Mack. I’ll be seein ya.”
“Okedoke.”
The other guy walked out, making quick, cold eye contact with me.
“Boy I tell ya,” said Mack. “It’s been one a them days. How ya been. Oh, before I forget, here.”
He held up a finger, patted his coat, looked around his bench area.
Handed me a couple small packages with the cutter and lock stud to trim .308 brass.
“Thanks man.”
“Got this I wanna show ya too,” he said.
He beeped some buttons on his safe.
Took out a .38spl revolver, Smith and Wesson Model 10, with “Michigan State Police” engraved on the backstrap. “That come walkin in today. Try the double action. That’s been jobbed.”
I aimed at a stuffed squirrel on a fake branch wall decoration he had.
Tsik.
It was nice.
“Try the single.”
Cliiick. Tsik.
It, too, was nice.
They always were.
Old guys don’t mess with shitty triggers.
I handed it back to him.
So what’s new, he said, closing the safe.
I said nothing.
He said that’s good.
Then he told me a sizable biography of the man who’d just left.
How he knew him, detailed work history, some fun facts, etc.
Repeat champion of a contest in town where they shoot at an egg at 100 yards with a .22lr and have to break the yolk.
They were both Marines.
Which segued to a story about the last Marine killed in Vietnam.
Mack knew him, knew his family.
Blown up by a rocket.
Death and war were always the topics at Mack’s.
People he knew who had died, or who he’d seen die.
People shot.
Blown up by rockets.
Drunk drivers.
Farm accidents.
Domestic disputes.
Military and cop work.
I realized Mack just had to say them out loud, to pass them back on to the world.
And for me to listen was no big deal.
To take the hot potato.
“Let’s just say, they didn’t have to crush his car too much to get it into that cube size, it was already there,” he said, as I ramped back in to what he was talking about.
The stories blend together with him doing almost all of the talking.
“Shit,” I said.
“Take on a tree at 120mph and shit happens. He was a good kid too.”
He described having to smudge some brains off an odometer to get a reading, which was procedure at accidents.
He rested a hand on his vice.
Twisting moustache with other hand.
The propane heater scorching my eyes.
He told me about a gunfight he was in.
Where he almost got shot through a door.
Which is why he instinctively stands to the side of every door he approaches.
Because when a load of buckshot comes through one at you, you think about it differently.
You ever been in a gunfight, he asked, squinting rhetorically.
Because he’d been in many.
And they ain’t fun, he said.
Which segued—as it always did—to him insisting warm socks to be the most important piece of gear.
Guns and ammo are good, but warm, dry socks win wars/gunfights.
Every one of his stories ultimately boils down to having clean/dry socks.
“I get a kick out of these bozos talking about a civil war now,” he said. He absently moved the crank on his vice. “It ain’t gonna happen. Not with these knuckleheads, no way.”
He said you gotta know when you enter war, you’re making a huge sacrifice.
Because you die no matter what.
Are you ready to take arms against your fellow man.
Are you ready to sit in a ditch for days in the cold, waiting.
And somehow, as it always did, this morphed into a scenario where I felt like he was directly addressing me for making some wild claim.
Like I’d just told him that I wanted a civil war and that it would be easy, I’d win it myself with no socks.
You gotta be ready to lose some, and take some, he said.
It’s not a game of pool.
The wager is different.
You cross a line.
That’s how it works.
So you gotta be ready.
“You gotta have a plan,” he said. “The side that has command and control will win. If you don’t have command and control, you got nothin.”
Lord, didn’t I know it.
Like I hadn’t been stacking bodies the last 48 hours.
Like I wasn’t a cold killer.
Like their juice wasn’t all over my hands.
I saw a montage of helicopters, with audio of machinegun fire, screaming, pictures of various German roaches dead on the counter, barbed wire, bombs going off.
Me, red-eyed in my chair holding the .308.
“Mack what do I owe you for this.”
He looked at the stuff and said, “Mmm [shrugged] . . . Merry Christmas!”
“Alright, thanks.”
“No problemo.”
Then, as he always did, he judo’d that deal into a favor.
I never got anything for free, I exchanged work after the fact.
This time it was helping clean up his condemned cabin.
The last time I worked up there I got a rash that lasted two months, as well as like, four ticks.
“Yeah I figure when the weather breaks we go up there and knock it all out, see if we can’t get a beam under that roof so it doesn’t fall on us and all that.”
“Sounds good, let me know.”
I was on my way out, holding the door, the cold coming in.
“Might do Grand Rapids gun show too, so let me know what weekends you’re free.”
“Will do.”
“And hey come by more often. Haven’t seen ya.”
“Alright.”
When I got home and turned on the lights, there was nothing.
None scattering.
None in the sink.
None in the cabinets.
None beneath the crockpot.
None beneath the fridge.
No bodies or bug shit stuck to the tape covering the outlets.
No nymphs.
No oothecae.
Everything smelled clean.
But for how long, I thought.
And that, really, was the key.
To zoom out and understand, no end.
Only the battles of in-between, the many and all-important.
No ultimate measure.
And no way to avoid engaging.
Which felt comforting to acknowledge.
The natural state.
Command and control in the face of surrendering to helplessness.
Killing all doubt in an instant.
I tossed the .308 trimming tools into my jug of .308 brass and grabbed the rifle again for a couple raises.
Shooting arm winged out wide.
Worked the bolt a few times while maintaining aim.
I pointed the rifle at the window, and the dark blue-gray winter expanse beyond, snow falling in big pieces.
A world of battles.
The big in-between.
Snowflakes moved through the ghost-ring sight, resembling a small snowglobe.
With the front red fiber-optic bead like a powerline in the distance.
The same scene just outside my window.
As within, so without.
And I thought about how tomorrow might as well be today.
As I often had.
Except where once that thought was a sentencing, now it just made sense.
Command and control.
I caught something out of the corner of my eye and turned.
There was a roach, crawling up the wall.
I raised my .308 and aimed.
Captured the roach in the ghost-ring and kept it beaded as it crawled.
And then it stopped, antennae circling slowly, suggesting, “Do it, motherfucker.”
I worked the bolt, keeping the roach beaded.
Tsik. 
Sam Pink is just a Lil sweetie. Twitter: @sampinkisalive. Instagram: @sam_pink_art.
Illustration: Sam Pink
