Cockroaches : big footed monsters

Raul Lilloy Traducido por Luisa González de Castejón


The cockroach is a beast million years older than man. Because of hidden reasons, they decided not to mutate. They live in holes, caves and crevices near sources of warmth; kitchens, boilers and stoves, even in our soft warm beds.
Zoologists have not been able to find out why they got themselves exiled from outdoor life in woods and meadows to dwell our foreboding homes. Danger has only increased since devastating insecticides were invented after II World War.
Nevertheless, cockroaches have continued to stay in gutters, cesspits, sweet smelling kitchens; anywhere their youngsters con be fermented by heat. Blatella Germanica and Orientalis are the most common western varieties. The first one is small with blond back and a swift stride, their females are very fertile and have short reproductive cycles, this allows them to swarm rapidly, covering every inch of the house. The Blatta Orientalis, black, bigger and less fertile, needs to stand back to take shelter where food and warmth are scarce. Their young ones are crunchy high energy delicacies for their cousins, the Germanica.
Night sets in; there is not longer any human smell, no lights on. Silently they crawl over the table looking for meat leftovers, egg shells and other titbits, they munch on and they mutter. I can hear them from my bedroom. I must scare them away; I go to the kitchen barefooted. I feel a kind of dampness and something crunching under my feet, my heels, more precisely.
I switch on the light and they scuttle to their holes. Some heavy females can’t manage to hide; they release their foetuses they had rammed up their buttocks and wait helplessly for the boiling water or disintegration under my slipper.
They will survive us, untouched by radioactivity and the acid dawning of the big nuclear night. They will leave their hiding places. For months they will feast on the festering remains on the shelves. Some of them, the ones with a scientific mind, will find us out, like in Pompeii, in our bedrooms, our snoring interrupted. They will wait for the decomposition of our proteins and fatty acids. Their dinner will turn us into dark shadows.
They will grow on and multiply, now out of danger, once the towns are empty of food they will get back to forests and meadows. They will remain watchful for evolution from some insect into homo sapiens for millions of years longer. Meanwhile they will retell their children about those times of big banquets and they will scare them with wonderful stories about towering footed monsters.