Last night, A▒▒▒▒ went to the bathroom, came out pretty quickly, and said,

‘are you
freaked out
by bugs?’

I said, ‘of course not. I’m only fascinated by them.’ He made a classic A▒▒▒▒ response to the effect of, ‘okay, bro, that’s weird, but i respect it.’ I said, ‘what's up?’ and he said, ‘there’s a dead roach.’ The first thing I noticed was how long its antennae were, and the first thing I thought was Why they are so long? The second thing I noticed was that it was not dead. I blew on it, which is the universal test for seeing if something is alive. It’s like striking a tuning fork. Feeling my wind, it wriggled around a little bit. Or one of its antennae moved. Or a leg twitched. Over time, the other legs started to move as well, and then it was wriggling all of its body parts around. By now, A▒▒▒▒ was saying stuff to me through the bathroom door, semi-occupied with something else, and I felt that feeling you get when you’re alone with another living being and it’s just the two of you. I (in this moment, right now, I’m realizing that I may have done the wrong thing) got two pieces of toilet paper and shimmied it under the roach. It took a good deal of shimmying, which made me think Maybe I'm making this thing a uncomfortable when it was just trying to die in peace. I walked out of the bathroom, toilet paper in my hand, roach on toilet paper. A▒▒▒▒ saw me and said, ‘are you saving it?’ I said, ‘yeah, I’m bringing it outside.’ I walked it over to the door, keeping a close eye on it, remembering the time I tried to save a chipmunk from a pool and lost focus for a second, long enough for the chipmunk to lose faith in me and jump from the ball, making a distinctive splat sound which I'll never forget. I opened the door to the outside world, eyes still fixed on the roach and its improbably long antennae, and that’s when A▒▒▒▒ said, ‘this doesn’t count as being a good person, by the way.’ I said, ‘that’s not what this is about.’ I deposited the roach on the sidewalk right outside of our door. I think that might not have been the right move. But... what was I going to do..... looking back, you know..... I wasn’t willing to put shoes on and what, migrate all the way to... the nearest wooded area or something? We were in Athens at the time. Should I have mentioned that? It was turned over on its back on the sidewalk when I saw a couple about to walk past. I didn’t want them to see me fiddling around with a roach, so I closed the door and watched them walk past through the door jamb. When the coast was clear, I went back outside and used the toilet paper to get a hold of the roach and flip it right-side-up. It took a few tries. I used a few different methods to do it. I tried the one where you put something up to the legs to see if it’ll hold on, but it didn’t seem able to grasp with its legs. Somehow, I finally flipped it up on its right side. But now it was tilted to one side, and the next thing I thought was Damn, this is not the most functional roach anymore. Maybe it was lying on the floor next to the toilet because it was about to die, and it was trying to have a normal death process, which I have disrupted. We left the apartment a couple more times that night, and each time, A▒▒▒▒ would ask me, ‘is the roach gone?’ and I would look at the spot where I'd left it, and I would say,

‘no, it’s
still there.’

At the end of the day, when it was finally dark outside, I looked one last time, and the roach had turned itself back over, face-up. This morning, when we were ready to step out for the day, A▒▒▒▒ said, ‘it’s gone.’ I felt something like grief and crouched down to see for myself. It was still there. I said, ‘well, it’s definitely dead by now.’ A▒▒▒▒ agreed. He said, ‘yeah, the hot sun...’ and I imagined the life getting drained out of it while I slept in. That afternoon, I thought about how I still hadn’t seen any ants in Greece. Just then, as we were descending the Acropolis, I saw a piece of wood stuck in the ground. An ant was crawling around on it. I recalled the old adage that if you can’t see any ants, you’re not looking hard enough. The nearest ant is never too far away. ever When we got back to the apartment, the first thing I did was check on the roach. Of course, it was still dead, but I wanted to, I guess, I don’t know, make sure it was still dead? I looked down and saw the roach, still overturned, but now with ants crawling on it. Little, tiny ants. Incidentally, do you think the Grecian ants have some kind of different accent than American ones? Like, do their pheromones somehow have a Grecian accent? Like, if you were to put them in the same enclosure as ants from back home, would they notice a significant difference between each other? Is this something that’s been studied? International ant relations? Do you think they would have any way of making sense of just how far away they are from each other? yes Days go by, and I kept checking on the roach. By the time it was time to leave the apartment for good, the roach had been torn limb from limb, literally, and the ants had carried each limb, one by one, to some undisclosed location. It looks like they have an anthill, or some measure of one, in a big crack in the sidewalk. They had swarmed the roach’s overturned belly, hollowed it out, ripped off all six of its legs, leaving nothing but the exoskeleton and the head, which, I guess, must also be made of exoskeleton or is otherwise impenetrable (or repulsive?) to them. eaten The last look I took at the roach was of its hollowed-out, legless exoskeleton banging against the walls of the entrance to the anthill as three or four ants struggled to fit it inside. They must have wanted the whole thing, bones and all. At this point, all I can hope for is that... I don’t know anymore. I don’t know if what I did was right——if I should’ve left the roach in the bathroom. But then A▒▒▒▒ would’ve been freaked out by it, and I would’ve let down my friend, and I still am in the business of prioritizing humans over roaches, I think, especially humans I’m friends with. And I’ve been friends with A▒▒▒▒ for eight years now I guess if I’m really looking on the bright side, I can see it as a good thing that I did for the ants. I’ve kept that ant colony fed for who knows how long. I watched them carry one of the legs and imagined that it might be a delicacy for them. Maybe the roach was able to enjoy one last sunset or some fresh air. Or maybe the ants started ripping its legs off as soon as I dropped it from the toilet paper. postscript next year