In Continuum.

Blattodea Horror

People are afraid of anything and everything. Little things can frighten the living daylights out of them, and have them scrambling for the closest and safest cover possible. In the case of my sister, she is afraid of everything that is unexpected in the house. Anything from a shower head that malfunctions to the knocking of her bedroom door. Everything scares her, and you should have seen the look of terror on her face when a beetle as big as the nail of her thumb, landed on her stomach one fine night. It was a few years ago, and the scream that she let out was enough to convince the rest of the neighborhood that a murder occurred in my unit. I bet half the residence were halfway through a phone call to the police, though I'd like to have them knock on our front doors to find that the culprit was a beetle that was five centimeters long.

There are fears that we cannot explain, and the ones that we do not want to be explained. Be it a traumatic experience in the past, or for reasons unknown. We all have certain fears about certain things, and not a single human can run away from it. I've heard every strange phobia there is to know in human beings out there, everything ranging from fishes to mustard, from balloons to pickles. There are phobias in every shapes and forms that it is not even funny. But I guess, there are some fears that are more common than the others, and for those who are afraid of Blattodea, or cockroaches, please stop reading at this point. Because the following entry is going to be about my experiences with those accursed insects, and the day when the earth stood still and the sun was blot out by flying cockroaches. Like the plague mentioned in the bible, only much more horrific and real.

I remember my friend from high school, and his name is Alvin. Alvin is a few inches taller than me, skinny as a stick, and so smart that it hurts. He is studying medicine right now, and I suppose that alone is enough to justify just how smart he is, academically. But even the strongest building has a brick we can remove to send it crashing to the ground, and the strongest bridges can be brought down with the removal of a single screw. Alvin has but one single weakness, and that is his fear in cockroaches. The only way to stop him from studying, was to put cockroaches in his textbooks and notes, or anything with six legs and feelers. I remember the experiment that we tried on Alvin one morning with a bunch of those flying ants that we killed in class, just before school started. We lined them up in the depression at the top of the table where people usually put their pens, and covered the hole with Alvin's textbooks. We had a good laugh when Alvin opened his books and dashed from one end of the class to the other, but all of us felt a certain level of guilt. We were determined to find out about his mortal fear of insects - especially cockroaches - and I was the one who found out all about it. Apparently, Alvin was a young boy wandering around the house when he decided to open some cupboards at home, when he saw a cockroach rested upon a shoe box inside one of the closets. He screamed, and the cockroach turned into a Kamikaze fighter and flew into his mouth.

Not just Alvin, but there are probably millions of people out there who are afraid of these creepy crawlers that haunts almost every inch of our good earth. It is hard to stomach the fact that these creatures are - in a warped way - our ancestors, and have been living on this planet longer than any living thing in existence right now. In fact, they are predicted to be the only surviving organism, if humans should be vaporized by a falling meteor. Instead of being infinitely fascinated by these creatures, most humans stamp on them when they have the chance, squash them with slippers or spray them with insecticides until they are dead five times over. After all, you can't be too careful with cockroaches, because they do have the tendency to come back to life after you have effectively killed them a few times. If you think that cats have nine lives, cockroaches can outlive them by a thousand times and more. Believe me, on that fact. Because I know of cockroaches, more than anybody out there, reading this post right now.

It was a fine morning, some time in my primary school days. Everything was ordinary in the canteen that morning, with the little kids obediently queuing up for their food, and the prefects patrolling the tables to make sure that nobody was breaking any school rules. I was sitting there with my bag next to me, just minding my own business with the cheap plate of chicken rice when the red dustbin caught my attention, the hundredth time in the past year or so. You see, in conjunction with the efforts to keep our environment clean and green, our school devised a plan a year ago to have a giant recycle bin in the canteen for the students to throw our trash cans. As a practice, everybody were made to throw their trash cans into the bin that was taller than most students, but nobody bothered to come and clear those cans. So they accumulated over the year, until a point whereby the cans are actually flowing out of the hole, and no more cans can be thrown in any longer. The smell was excruciating for those who dared to venture close enough, and it created a natural radius of about five meters all around, and nobody entered that circle of death. Everybody stayed away, and that was when the school realized that it was time to remove the damn trash from the bin.

Phone calls were made, and people in uniforms came with their rubbish bags and their rubbish trucks. I was still there minding my own business with that horrendous plate of artificial chicken rice, when one of the workers opened the little door at the back of the trash bin to retrieve the cans. That was when the inevitable happened, and it was triggered the moment he opened the door, and that was the point of no return. It was like a black cloud of poisonous fume that escape the opened door, and the man was literally thrown off his feet in the line of its onslaught. The canteen was plunged into a sudden state of silence - a silent terror. The children watched with their mouths opened, their eyes widened, their breathes held in their lungs as they watched the cockroaches fly out of the trash bin that has been in dormant for the past year. The lights from the outside were gone, the canteen was in a sudden solar eclipse of some kind. The swarm of cockroaches invaded the canteen and the playground, flying through the canteen like a swarm of locusts, devouring the living daylights out of every student and teacher. Like the scene from 300 when the Persian threatened to have their arrows to blot out the sun, the cockroaches that day blotted out the sun almost completely. Only, we couldn't fight in the shade, like the Spartans. Instead, we ran.

Miraculously, I grew balls that morning. My fear for one or two cockroaches was cured by the fear of a million more swarming into the canteen in torrents. Waves upon waves of cockroaches came out from that single recycle bin, and nobody could do anything about it but to watch the insects take over our world. I saw three cockroaches on my bag as I was trying to escape from the scene, and I remember swapping them off my bag with the back of my hands and running as fast as I could through the canteen and back to the classrooms. I could hear the cockroaches hissing as they flew threw the empty canteen, and the way they sounded as they crashed into the spinning fans and other screaming children. There was a white cockroach - a mutated species that I have never seen before - flying through the air, and its comrades landed on my PE teacher, who started a strange dance in the middle of the canteen with her hands flying everywhere around her body. I was petrified, and frightened beyond sanity. I've seen hordes of ants crawling across a concrete pavement, but to see a cloud of cockroaches flying towards me was definitely the first experience, and the most terrifying one at that. I've never been afraid of cockroaches, and I am not exactly afraid of them now either. But put any brave soul in front of that opened door behind the trash bin, and I swear that even the bravest man would wet his pants.

That was probably my worst experience with cockroaches, in my life. I have experienced their distant cousins in my life, but none as ferocious or as terrifying. I used to tell people that there are two kinds of cockroaches that freak me out: The kind that flies at my eye level, and the kind that appears in your room, and then disappears. To add on to that list, I'd like to say that when cockroaches appear in the millions, run and hide. Run, and hide. Be it a soldier, a terrorist, a warrior or a Spartan. None of those would matter when the swarm of cockroaches attack. Just run for your lives, and think about your honor and pride later. It is a force to be reckoned with, and you sure wouldn't want to be in the way of those creepy crawlers, I tell you. I've been there, amidst the swarm of roaches - and it is not funny. Not funny at all.