The Cockroach Wars Part 3
The Cockroach Wars Part 3
The Noose Is Naught
by Jerry Waxman
[This is an update report. Previously, I had become frustrated with the behaviors of domestic cockroaches so much that I reached into an arsenal of inventions I had once collected to rid the house of these pests. The first weapon was a noose. I tied a string to the back of a refrigerator, and lay the noose end on the floor. When a cockroach would step into the noose and keep walking, it would literally hang itself. That was the plan.]
The next morning: I looked behind the refrigerator. There was no cockroach in the noose. It looked as though no cockroach had even been there. Yet they had been in other parts of the apartment – including right there in the kitchen.
Even as I stood next to the refrigerator, a teenage sized cockroach trotted arrogantly toward me and sat down in front of me, looking at the noose for a few seconds. It scampered away when it noticed me raising my foot. But the little delinquent didn’t disappear without letting me know that he and his friends were laughing at me.
The arrogance of teen cockroaches! Laughing at me in my own kitchen . . . I let it go.
This evening I checked again behind the refrigerator. A king of swishing noise had aroused my curiosity. Sure enough, there was a big cockroach. It had encountered The NOOSE!
The big cockroach had crawled up the string just above the noose’s knot. He was swinging, not hanging. Standing above the knot he was swinging like a pendulum, as smaller cockroaches looked on and cheered. Using the string’s leverage – true to trapeze artistry – the giant cockroach maneuvred himself to a place high up on the refrigerator. From there he observed as the younger cockroaches took turns swinging on the string.
Again the cheers and jeers of the gang of youthful, hooligan cockroaches followed me to an adjoining small room, where I found a bottle of floor cleaner, and started shaking it like a can of Raid. The cockroaches suddenly disappeared. They can’t read. They couldn’t even see that the bottle I had was empty.
They haven’t won this war yet… Stay tuned.
Meanwhile the city of Sderot has usurped my job. I had spent weeks with a garden hoe and rake to dig out all the thorns from the yards surrounding my block. The front yard looks pretty good.
And I had amassed all the layers of thorns and trash and rubbish that people had thrown there over the years into a massive heap. Thought about burning it, but the fire department wouldn’t allow it.
The city sent a team with a tractor. They cleared out all the thorns and bristles from the yards I hadn’t gotten to. There is even a little basketball court – sans basket – that they unearthed; a relic of an earlier age in this city.
Now there is a much larger heap in the back yard. The city of Sderot may take it away someday. But until they do, I am sure it serves as a fortress for cockroaches and the like who send their scouts and troops to my apartment when they see the opportunity.
Perhaps the city would like the honor of usurping my other job – making a better cockroach noose.
