Chapter 4 DRAFT 1.1

Learning to Live with “Others”

 

         Midway may have had only a couple dozen humans when I arrived, but it was teeming with life of all sorts, and not just the protected sea birds.  One morning while showering, I felt a tiny prickle on my shin.  I thought not much of it.  It was the kind of prickle I usually felt after nicking myself with a razor, but, instinctively, I looked down anyway.  A two-inch monstrosity of a cockroach was clinging to my leg like I was a tree being swamped by a tidal wave and his only hope.  Antennae wriggled at me.  I looked at him and he looked at me and I screamed something to the upshot of “bwah ah ah ah ah!”  In one fluid motion, I shook the little b*****d off, shoved open the shower door and swept out as gallantly as possible wearing nothing but soapsuds. 

         Cockroaches really are evolutionary survivors, because he scampered, lickety split, to the edge of the shower floor, intending to wait me out the safety of the corner where the water was low and without current.  I wasn’t going back in there for him stark naked and unshod.  He knew it and I knew it.  But it was my shower, and I was taking it back.

         What he didn’t know about me was all the times I’d watched airport fire trucks empty 1,500 gallons of water in less than 90 seconds. Water under pressure is powerful.  I could barely reach the showerhead without being on tiptoes, but I managed to balance, somewhat precariously, on the door threshold to reach it.  I swiveled the spray and chased my foe, making sure that I never chased him back towards me.  It was close, a few times.

         He was tough. He didn’t give up without a fight.  He scrambled about, swam when he needed to, and tried to climb walls even his remarkable Darwinian adaptations were not equal to.  Several minutes of swirling, pounding water, and many a “Take that you little f****r!”, and he was a dead cockroach; battered, beaten, legs in the air. 

         And far too big to go peacefully down the drain.  Not being able to stomach the thought of feeling him again, my leg where he had clung was still, well, icky, I wadded up enough toilet paper to pad my hand and dropped him quickly into the toilet.  I flushed fast and watched, just in case he had been faking me out. 

         I made it a point to thoroughly inspect the shower before stepping in from that point on.

         Termites were, and I have no doubt still are, slowly eating away Midway.  Walls and ceilings, doors and window frames, door jams and windowsills, furniture, trees.  Everywhere I looked were the oddly beautiful tracks left behind by decades and generations of termites.  Despite the inherent threat of some structure falling down around my ears without warning, there were some truly artistic leavings of these industrious little creatures. 

         That’s not to say that I would purposely intend to live with termites.  I had in my rooms a recliner so riddled that I took my life into my own hands every time I sat in it.  Thousands of rolls of toilet paper stored in Midway’s warehouses, enough to last an army’s lifetime, had been the little bugs’ smorgasbord.  I never took a pee, or anything else for that matter, without thoroughly inspecting the paper to ensure that any inhabitants had completely moved out.  It was like wiping your a*s with Swiss cheese. 

writer's not - not finished

Author's Note

unfinished chapter.