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roach fertility woes

it is funny when you get to see figurative language come to life... like i might once have written in some corny poem, years ago, how a pregnant roach was a harbinger of chaos... and then the other night i witnessed a very egg-laden roach traverse its way around the pull knob of my dresser, only to evade my attempt at squashing it by ducking into the crevice beneath the drawer. i knew then, i just knew on this gut level, that this stupid little bug was going to unburden itself of its progeny in my f*ing underwear drawer. oh yes i seem to have an intuition for the maternal habits of le roach.

well, days have passed and i searched in vain for the egg sack, for the mama roach, for any means of stopping the inevitable. i even placed a toxic little bait station beneath the right foot of my bowlegged dresser, hoping perhaps the roach dame would be jonesing for that succulent poison and indulge prior to birthing. clearly no such luck as there has been a baby roach exodus from some impossible-to-pinpoint place in/under/behind my bureau. if only i knew where the epicenter of life was... i could destroy them all. (wow that sounds very evil) alas, no matter how much i paw around through my clothing, unearthing mismatched socks, threadbare undies, long-abandoned garter belts, i cannot find the source of the hatchlings.

as is sit here now, after midnight, my laptop computer perched atop the desk that flanks the dresser, the micro roaches become bold, their circadian rhythms dictating nocturnal adventure. the heat of the computer is like some kind of homing beacon to them, and they (with seeming reverence and awe) one-by-one make a pilgrimage to its black humming monolithic base. it is the mecca for wee roaches and i am the wrathful god, sitting here with one hand on a heart-shaped post-it note pad, ready to smite them. so far the death count for the evening stands at 9 (as evidenced by 9 little brown blemishes on the hot-pink post-it pad/tool-of-death).

my mind reels trying to do a virtual census on the roach population currently in this apartment. how many roaches emerge from one egg sack? i realize i could google this to know for sure, but i am terrified of the possible answer. i like to imagine there is a superbly finite number in this particular dresser eco-system (like, say, 25 babies) so that i can be sure to kill all of them lest any grow to be pregnant teens in the ghetto that is my pants drawer.

before = after