This is a War we’re fighting here.

Not the War on Terrorism. Not the War on Drugs.

It’s the War on Cockroaches. Slinky. Dirty. Spiny. Sneaky. Germ-infested. Live through anything. Outlast anything. Disgusting. Cockroaches.

This is the story of our latest battle.

I was picking up in our bedroom, getting ready to vacuum. Ellie was sitting very nearby playing with something of interest. I casually picked up the shirt I had slept in the night before and then tossed on the floor that morning as I rushed around trying to get ready for school and inadvertently flushed out a cockroach who was apparently planning on making his nest in my nightshirt (!!!), bleh. He scuttled across the floor, skirted around Ellie’s feet (inner cringe) and scurried out the door. It was so big I could hear his feet pattering on the floor.

I raced after, bound and determined to kill it. I don’t know if it was because of my gasp and then holler, a desire to be in on the action, or just the intrinsic disgusting-ness of having a  cockroach run across your toes, but Ellie jumped up and followed me. The cockroach settled on a new dark home inside a hat Ellie had left on the hallway floor.

I told Ellie very sternly and in a freaked out voice to, “Stay there! Don’t move!” She obeyed me. She didn’t budge an inch. She was scared because she could tell I was scared, and looked a little like she was ready to cry.

My heart was going a mile-a-minute. I frantically looked around for a suitable whacking device within reaching distance. I didn’t want to let that little bugger out of my sight. I settled on a Nalgene bottle that I had been using as a bookend. I let out my warrior yell, picked up the hat (flinging it a little to make sure the cockroach ended up on the floor, not running up my arm), and desperately started whacking away. I don’t think my attempted “warrior yell” did much to mask my fear, because this is when Ellie screamed for real, waving her hands and did start to cry. Poor thing. She was terrified, and it was probably all due to seeing me so afraid and crazy-acting.

The Nalgene turned out to be a poor choice of whacking device. Not enough flexion. I didn’t smash the creature, but I did manage to flip it onto its back, incapacitating it long enough to race over to the bathroom (two steps away), grab a wad of toilet paper and–cringing–smash it dead. Using a flimsy little wad of toilet paper to smash cockroaches is the worst because you can feel their bodies crunching. It’s not a satisfying crunch.

Despite the fact that his abdomen was completely mush, he was still waving his beady eyes and antennae at me! Yu-uck! In an attempt to reassure Ellie and myself, I told her that we had got him. We threw him away in the toilet and flushed him down. I don’t really liked to flush half-alive cockroaches down the toilet because I have a feeling they can survive the flushing and crawl back out. But, I had a terrified Ellie to calm down and really really didn’t want to have to crunch it again.

In the end we prevailed over our enemy. Of course that’s one down, 5,674 billion to go.

If you are one of those people who like reading about the horrifying things that happen to other people, you can read more harrowing cockroach tales at my friend’s blog, there are two stories: The Kitchen War and Files from the Roachagrin: The Leg Attack.