Roaches

What may have been terror becomes nostalgia if we give it enough time. A roach ran out from under the stove and once in our bed, and how you screamed in that flat where we spent so many hours laying entwined on the futon on the floor. It was the time before the children when we didn’t disappear though without wanting we tried. The tenement with the Chechens, and the skunk who lived in the yard that autumn with her pups. And then the mice, the one we caught in the trap but did not die, how it squealed a sound I did not know an animal could make and how I had to stamp on it, and then it was dead. I know you would not want me to tell but then you cried. I felt a kind of ugliness, even when killing the roaches. We kept our windows lit. I want to say something about the rain but all I remember is the snow, and the warmth from the radiator, and how it hissed like a roach. Even high, we swept and cleaned. Somehow the roaches made me nostalgic for when I was a child in Brooklyn, and how me and my uncle would catch them under jars, and look at them and how they have faces and seem to speak to us like aliens. Ancient insects who skittered around the dinosaurs. But that affection for these insects had long ago evolved into cringe. We got the RAID and the traps, and after months our slum landlord even paid for an exterminator. We think the Chechen father on the second floor threatened him. We ate on a card table in the kitchen with my small son when he could visit, and sometimes you’d bring dinner home from Bob Evans where you were the hostess and waited on orders. I wrote during the day, or traveled to read, wanting only to return to those few rooms to hold you and fall to sleep with my face in your hair. Tonight at work the mice have returned with the cold weather and I watch one run across the common area, and it brought me back across decades to those first rooms where we found each other’s mouths. Do you remember the blue flame of the gas stove where you lit your cigarettes? “Look,” you tapped me on the shoulder. “Do you see it?” And there along the kitchen baseboard was a gray mouse, holding a roach in its tiny paws, and eating it.