cafe cockroach

When I woke up this morning, I almost forgot I was living in the middle of the concrete jungle. The soft morning light was glowing through our curtains, while a cool March breeze bathed my face in its fresh crispness. I stretched down the length of our warm, pillowy mattress. I ground fresh coffee beans in our new coffee grinder, and set them to brew. I paused to gaze out the window.

And then an enormous cockroach climbed up from the back of our coffee maker, hesitated as if to consider where she might be most effectively sullifying, and then squeezed her chitinous little body right into the coffee filter holder.

M. killed her for me, but certainly not before she had a chance to add a certain je ne sais quoi cockroach essence to our freshly brewed morning ablution.

Which is why, ten years from now, a wandering schoolgirl will find me and my children living in a refrigerator box in the woods 300 miles north of Manhattan, surrounded by various indulgent and unused cast-iron kitchen implements, chronically ill from cockroach egg blood fever, poor and homeless but -- most importantly -- out of this occasionally Godforsaken city.