Kockroach Read Online Free PDF Page A

towheaded cretins like those two. But now, perchance, if ’tis not too much trouble, maybe you could do a small something for me.”

3

    The world, Kockroach discovers, is marvelously hospitable when your skin is pale and you walk on two legs.
    Each morning now, just before dawn, his gut full to bursting, he scurries around corners, through marvelous dank alleyways strewn with aromatic scraps, to a pile of wooden cartons leaning against an old brick wall. He climbs over two cartons, tunnels under a third, arrives at a crate with one edge shattered. Through the shattered timbers lies a comfortably narrow space where he can sleep with pressure on three sides of his body. He carefully takes off his coverings, folds them neatly, grooms himself for an hour or more, and then slips into the narrow space.

    At dusk he awakens, grooms himself again, cleans every inch of his coverings with his teeth, places them on his body in the precise order he learned from the picture, and slithers out of his carton, emerging into the night to feed.

     

    Behind almost every building there are containers left out for the great monstrous collectors to devour in the morning, and from these containers Kockroach gorges himself nightly. Soggy breads, rotted fruit, the wilted leaves of great heads oflettuce, peelings from all sorts of starchy vegetables, porridgy mixtures congealed into delicious balls of gluck.

    In his old body it was the starches and sugars for which he hungered, but this body eats everything and savors, most of all, the knuckly joints of meat he finds in the containers. Sometimes, if he is lucky, the meat he scavenges is covered by a clutch of writhing maggots. He sucks off the maggots, shakes his head wildly as they slide down his throat, and then pulls off the red-blooded meat with his teeth.

    From puddles, or from snaking green tubes, he washes down his nocturnal feasts with water.

    There is far more in the containers than even he can eat, but this bounteous buffet is not without its risks. If he makes too much noise, rattling the containers as he searches, sometimes humans stick their heads out of windows and shout phrases at him which he dutifully shouts back. “Get the hell out of there.” “Ain’t you got no self-respect?” “Get a job, you bum.”

    Other times he is forced to share his food with creatures that fill him with a long-ingrained terror, slippery rats, narrow-muzzled dogs, raccoons, and, worst of all, cats, with their flat ugly faces and their quick paws. He remembers these brutal felines having lazy sport with the young cockroaches that scurried carelessly within the ambit of their gaze. They would flick out a paw, knock a cockroach on its back, lethargically pierce its abdomen with a claw. Even though he now stands five times taller than the largest cat, fear overwhelms him whenever he sees such a creature. But still he eats. Since when did fear ever long stop a cockroach from eating.

    Once, when he regurgitated his food out of long habit, arat rushed between his legs and began to slurp. He has since learned there is no need to regurgitate in this body. His teeth are ugly yet marvelous things, and once he pulps the food in his mouth he can swallow it straightaway.

    He should be hugely content in his new life, he is living a cockroach’s dream, food and shelter, a nice brown suit and leather wingtips.

    But something, something is missing.

     

    Nightly now, after feasting, he makes tentative forays into the world of the humans. He has no longing for friendship, no pathetic need to blend within the jagged contours of human society, but still he feels an urge to insinuate himself among the specimens of this noisome species.

    At first his fear and self-consciousness were debilitating. He shied away from anyone who came close, aware that he was being stared at, certain that every human was seeing him for what he truly was. Which of the humans, he wondered as his head swiveled back and forth in alarm,