One day, my daughter threw a live cockroach on my chest while I was laying on the couch. It was two inches long, nearly black, and I almost choked to death on that scream I suppressed because I didn’t want to alarm the child. She was very happy with her new ‘buh-bug’ friend so I had to make it seem like his immediate trip down the toilet was real fun for him.
I’ve lived in the South all of my adult life and I’ve learned along the way to never, ever leave any sort of food residue anywhere, to make sure garbage cans have lids, to take the trash out daily, and to always make sure pantry foods are completely sealed.
I learned these lessons especially quickly once I discovered that Palmetto bugs (quaint Southern term for enormous fucking cockroach) not only exist, but can actually fly and when they do so, they tend to aim for your face.
We’ve managed to live here in our spacious attic apartment for 5 years without any sort of ongoing bug problem. Then due to renovations, most of the downstairs neighbors left all at once. And it began.
Opening the dishwasher I ran the night before and finding a giant cockroach dead on the bottom of it isn’t how I want to start my day, but it was happening more often. I tried to convince myself of how likely it was that the things wandered in after the cycle was done and just died of old age and that they were not in fact in there the whole time- ricocheting off my plates and perhaps losing a leg or breaking off an antennae on the utensils. Or leaving an eyeball on a cup. And then being steamed, releasing buggy juices onto every dish.
Then I kept seeing them occasionally hanging out on my cleaned and disinfected counter. Big ones, small ones, brown ones, black ones- they all also especially love my bathroom at night. Ever step on a large, crunchy bug with your bare foot at 2am? The sound is horrifically memorable.
Finally I discover a fun fact that had managed to escape me these 18 years of Southern living; cockroaches just LOVE dirt!
I’d had a bag of potting soil leftover from my unfortunate attempt at growing quieter things than children and a bag of substrate for the hermit crabitat in my pantry for a few months.
One day I caught a scuttling movement from inside one of the bags and jumped back When I braced myself enough to finally look in the bag, I was reminded of those cute little ant farms from some primary grade classroom.
What was happening in the substrate bag was sort of like that, only instead of a little window into the fascinating bug way of life, this was a horrific portal into some vast hellscape made of nothing but scratchy multitudes of legs, biting mouths and the endless flutter of shiny, smokey brown wings.
After containing the soil in a hundred plastic grocery bags, I wrapped my mouth and nose with an old shirt, put on some gloves and GUTTED that pantry, tossing out chewed through, egg- lined food containers and scrubbing every inch of the shelves and floor with bleach.
I took everything out of the cupboards and relined them, then washed every dish I owned. I thought I was on top of the problem after that. I didn’t know that the war had just begun.
To cut down on fruit flies, I keep the bananas inside of a plastic grocery bag. One day, I needed to put a banana in Violet’s backpack so I put my hand inside of that plastic grocery bag..
Just as I went to wrap my hand around one of them, I felt something grip around my ring finger. I thought, for a split second, that I had slid my finger into something sort of hard and my brain summoned the image of my finger next to a banana and began to form possibilities of what other sort of thing might be in that that bag; a plastic children’s toy that was from the tip of my finger to passed the second knuckle in length? A marker cap? Black. Something black like a wad of electrical tape..
As though my body figured it out before my head put it together, I screamed and threw the bag, jumping away and scanning the floor until I saw the huge black cockroach scurry out.
Super proud of myself though because I screamed like 75% less than I would’ve when I first moved here.
Or maybe I’m screaming even as I type this. (Three hours of sleep last night.)
One morning, I went to give Violet a cough drop before school. I drew one of the wrapped lozenges from it’s bag and saw that the wrapper had been gnawed through.
So I calmly walked over to the sink and began to shake out the bag. A couple more lozenges fell out, along with some black specs of roach feces, then more lozenges, a live giant cockroach, more lozenges and finally, a small mountain more of feces.
Later, I emptied the medicine cabinet. They’d been in there, leaving their small shit pellets on the shelves and in open boxes of medicine capsules. The cabinet is in my bedroom, just feet from where we sleep.
There are people that will tell you that Diatomaceous Earth is a miraculous bug killer and that it will kill fleas as well as roaches and that you should use it instead of harsh chemicals because it’s much better to let your children be eaten alive by disease carrying insects than to ever use a harsh chemical.
Those people are lying. Or maybe they live in part of the country where every type of bug hasn’t become resistant to just about everything. Those people can be as green as they like, but I currently have every utensil in airtight plastic containers because I will never get the image of bugs crawling over my spoons out of my head. Plus at least half of my family sleeps with their mouths open.
So I’ve been using this source kill gel that has worked wonders so far.
Unless they are all just biding their time in our attic’s attic, waiting for one fine, horrible day ..
