Cafards

I grew to tolerate the small cafards that reigned freely in my chambre de bonne in the 16eme. Sure, with their soft charcoal color and space age-esque design, they were quite comely as far as cockroaches go, but terrifying nonetheless. Every night, I'd comb my sheets for any critters before hermetically sealing my entire body with cheap cotton sheets. I was horrified by the prospect of a cafard inching along my face and creeping around my lips, but still my head remained exposed.

After my second night in the chambre de bonne, I asked Marie-Helene, the spacey landlord, about the cockroaches, and she chirped, "If you think your room is bad, you should see my kitchen at dawn!" It was unbearably sticky, so she gave me a fan, and that was that.

Naturally, my first response was to buy poison from the Monoprix. I set four landmines in the darkest corners of my chambre de bonne, all of which were within arms reach of the bed. I waited a few days, imagining a proud pawn roach carrying the poisonous "food" on his back to the queen's lair. Upon gobbling up the treat, she'd immediately dematerialize into metallic crimson ash, and all of her pawns would follow suit in a musical domino effect. In the end, however, I probably did more harm to my own health than to theirs given that I was practically inhaling the poison every night as I slept. Incidentally, the poison was ineffective.

The curative approach being a failure, I adopted preventative measures and began to blast-clean my room with bleach, lemon Pine-Sol, and such everyday. Sometimes, I'd squeeze a glob of neon blue gel directly onto the roaches that so happened to be in the way of my cleaning. They would die slowly, and I could simply flush them down the drain instead of having to crush their bodies and to squeeze the corpsed exoskeleton in a tissue between my fingers as I transfered it to the garbage.

Militaristic cleanliness was gratifying but did little to eradicate the cafards. Their resilience dwarfed my stamina, so I resigned to coexistence, a one state solution.