More stories Sunday, 15-Mar-98 08:54:20

Message: 153.37.136.121 writes:

I thought I'd post some more stories.

1. A few years ago one of my wife's friends was living in a college apartment. I went over one day to help her move her stuff in. The building had a problem with roaches (though we didn't know that at the time.) As I was carrying in boxes of clothes and shoes! she was busy cleaning in the kitchen. "Oh, my God," I heard her say, so I dropped my load and went in the kitchen. She was crouched down near the floor, papertowels in hand, a cupboard in front of her wide open. Inside I could see movement, little scurrying bodies. "They're cockroaches, I think," I said, moving in for a closer look. My wife's friend stood up and stepped back. She was wearing sweat pants and a long tee-shirt with brand new penny loafers, the reddish leather kind with a hard leather sole. I'd had my eye on them all morning. As we stood on the hard linoleum floor she looked at me and asked, "That's disgusting, what should I do?" Siezing the opportunity I said, "Well, you'll have to call an exteriminator for any that might be in the walls or ceiling, but we better get rid of the ones in this cupboard ourselves. Why don't I get down there and force out on the floor and you can step on them." "Fine with me," she said, and took a step closer to the cupboard, lifting on of her shoes like she was cocking a gun. "Make sure you send them toward my foot, I don't want them crawling away." Now roaches are hard to corral as I found out, but since there was nowhere else to go inside the cupboard, in a matter of minutes, one came leaping out. It sped onto the floor right toward the outstretched shoe, and with a sudden whomp my wife's friend brought her loaer down on the bug, squishing it flat. "It sounded like crackers," she grimaced. "Do you think it's dead?" Sure, I told her and turned back to find another. She kept her loafer firmly planted on the first roach and raised her other shoe. This time two bugs came scurrying out and, and she sent her brown loafer flying after the biggest, catching it with the toe of her shoe, only squashing its head. The back end was still wiggling. Not wanting to remove her other foot yet, she asked me "Check to see if the other one is dead, will you?" So I leaned down close to her first loafer as she leaned it back a little bit. Underneath I could could see the insect body gooey and squashed, strands of guts dripping between her sole and its body on the floor. "He's dead," I said, and she quickly yanked her foot away and settled it quickly down on the other half of the insect under her other foot. Standing with feet together, she bounced up and down on her toes for a moment. Then, spotting the other one that had gotten away she shot out her left shoe again and caught it with her heel. As the bug crushed, she was caught off balance and started to fall. The bug smeared under her heel and its guts made her foot slide more. She caught herself though, looked at the smeared bug, then threw her hair back and seemed to look more determined than ever. "Let's go," she said. So it went on for a little while like this. I opened all the cupboars and whenever I found roaches I would knock them on the floor while she played hopscotch on them. When we were all done the floor was a smeared mess. "I'll help you clean it up," I told her. "No," she said, "I'm just gonna wear these shoes around here anyway (she picked each foot up to show me the slimy, goo-covered soles) so most of this will just get tracked around on my shoes and I'll clean the whole floor later. Besides maybe their friends can see them dead all over my floor and they'll stay away from me. Or I'll give them a taste of this." And with that she stomped again on one of the dead roaches, exploding its mangled guts all over. And I left the kitchen with her looking around for the next place to clean, each of her hard leather loafers resting on cold, crunchy roaches.

J.P.