Every night before she goes to bed, she heads to her kitchen to pour herself a mug of hot water and drinks it as a part of the before-going-to-bed ritual. And since nobody remembers when, every time she does so, she sees a cockroach around the hot water pot sneaking away to the underneath of the microwave stove, however, instead of running off and disappearing like other bugs, the cockroach stays where it is, looking like it is peaking and watching if the human woman would do anything that other humans would do to a bug.
Night after night, after another night. She always sees the cockroach doing the same. She wonders if it is the same roach. She is never a person who has the heart to kill a bug, so she never can raise a slipper of hers and land it onto the roach. On the contrary, she begins to sense some familiarity with it since she sees it every night, and that is the only living thing she’d see before going to bed besides her cat. And from the “look” of the roach, she believes the feeling is mutual.
So she talks to herself, “Hmm, it’s quite a different cockroach, maybe I can feed it. It looks scared and hungry, it’s not easy for them to survive in a world full of human beings, is it? It must feel safe with me. That’s why it stays because I’m kind, not like the most of the people outside.” So that’s what she does since then. She puts very small pieces of the leftover of the day, anything edible near the microwave stove. “It is a cockroach we’re talking about, not a food critic.” She talks to herself.
A cockroach like itself could never have thought there is a place for it as a shelter, not to mention it’s provided by a human. Though by its nature it loves to wander around and pick up everything it can find on the streets or from a sink of any household to its mouth. It’s kind of fresh and interesting feeling to have a regular supply of food, to be fed, to be taken care of. Little by little it gets used to it which is a surprise to itself.
So the cockroach comes back every night. As days go by, it grows stronger than before and even its shell looks shinier, and all the nutrition and the care given by the lady also has made its brain more functional. A cockroach, is it capable of doing thinking or not? From the perspective of humans, the answer tends to be No. However, even if so, maybe we have found one different cockroach because apparently it thinks.
The cockroach kind of likes its life now in this lady’s apartment though it’s old and small, totally a perfect place for a single woman, a divorced woman, an abandoned failure so they say. The cockroach is so grateful for the lady because she seems the only one in the world who never tries to kill it but cares about its wellbeing. One day, the cockroach starts talking to itself, “she looks so lonely, and I haven’t seen a soul coming visit her at all, so it might be a good idea if I can keep her company, the kind that she really needs. Wish there’s something I could do to repay her.”- It ponders on this idea back and forth so sincerely and so intensely.
