To the Roach I Share a Bathroom with

When Attending a Funeral

by Karen Luke Jackson

You surprise me careening down the white porcelain sink, although as a child I saw your ancestors darken our kitchen pipes, an invasion my father tried to end with poisoned pellets. But your family is a hardy bunch (I’m told you’ll inherit the earth after we’re gone) and I choose, since I’m here to help bury a man of God and you too are one of God’s creatures and I am nearing my own demise, not to crush or flush you (assuming I’m still fast enough). And in the second it takes me to decide, you skitter down the drain only to appear the next morning when I pull the shower curtain back: a brown scab plastered to the shower wall. That’s when I mentally telegraph—I’ll leave you alone, if you’ll stay put—and maybe you hear me and maybe you don’t, but from the time I turn the water on until I towel myself dry, you don’t twitch your antennas or scale the tiles (I eyed you the whole time, were you too eyeing me?) and I congratulate myself on my Christian largesse, my Buddhist compassion, my pagan admiration (you are tenacious). But tonight, when your cousins writhe the walls, their exoskeletons crackling, I bolt from bed, grab the flashlight.