Cockroaches

from Balm in the Gilead

by Lanford Wilson

Dopey:  You know, though, what I was thinking what she said; before that, about the cockroaches and all upstairs; and she's right. It's a crawling bughouse up there. 

What really gripes me; she mentioned all the roaches playing, like, games on the floor up there.  A roach's attitude just gripes the hell out of me.  But what burns me, I've been reading up not recently, but I saw it somewhere where... not only was the roach that same, exact, goddamn roach that we know; not only were they around about two million years before man, you know, before we came along... anthropologists or whatever, geologists over in Egypt or somewhere, looking for the first city, they dug down through a city, and straight on down through another, you know, they're piled up like a sandwich or in layers like a seven-layer cake.  And they cut down, down through one century to the one before it and the one before that, and in every one they found more goddamned cockroaches than anything! And they got to where before man ever existed and, like, in the basement of the whole works, there those damn bugs still were.

So they've been around, like I said, for about a miIlion years before we came along.  But not only that!  They've made tests, and they found out that a roach can stand --- if there was going to be a big atom bomb explosion, they can stand something like fourteen times as much radio-whatever-it-is, you-know-activity as we can.  So after every man, woman and child is wiped out and gone, like you imagine, those same goddamn cockroaches will still be crawling around happy as you please over the ruins of everything.

Now the picture of that really gripes my ass!