Matthew Sheret

“Dude, I don’t want to freak you out, but you should probably shift over there.”
“Huh?”
“Just… um… get up a sec.”
“Sure, what’s up?”
“Oh, it’s, yeah it’s okay. I thought I saw a big ass roach behind you, but it was just this ant wriggling on the floor”
“Hah, okay.”
“Yeah. I mean it’s New York, so-”
“-yeah, everyone’s got them, right.”
“Right. We’ve not got it bad. I mean, they’re in the walls but we keep pretty clean so they don’t come out much. But we don’t have ants, so I’m not sure how that got in.”
“Probably just on a shoe or something. The first cockroach I saw here, the only one I’ve seen here, was when I was over last April. This sickly little yellow thing was crawling around outside of a cafe that two of my friends were in at the time. Hideous little creature.”
“Yeah aren’t they? We’ve got two kinds: House Roaches, which are those yellowy ones about this big, and Water Bugs.”
“Water Bugs?”
“Yeah, they’re the huge ones, about that big, shiny black shells. They fly about, outside, at your face, they can’t breed indoors so it’s always outside. But sometimes they’ll get in through a window, you’ve got to try and get rid of them while all the time it’s flying at your face. I mean, you shoo it out the door somehow, but still. We used to get a lot of them in Bed-Stuy… actually I’ve got a funny story about that. This one day I got home, just after we’d moved in. The people on our block thought we were cops, these two white girls, but Stacy’s about two inches shorter than me so clearly not. Anyway I’m coming home one night, nod to the guys like ‘What’s up?’, head inside and Stacy’s just screaming. I’m like ‘Dude, what’s going on?” and she’s got this stick in her hand, tells me there’s a huge roach flying around my room. So I’m like ‘Ohshit, what do we do?’ and she’s just swinging at it telling me to kill it ‘Pfft, nuh-uh, you’re in there now, totally your problem. Do you want a shoe?’ so she just yells ‘Go get a boy!’ I head downstairs and B-’s there with his girlfriend and I’m like ‘Um, B-, sorry but, uh, there’s this huge roach in our room flying at us’ ‘Man, that’s a Water Bug’ ‘Would you be able to come and help us kill it?’ and he just shrugs like ‘No way man’. Now B-’s about your height, this built black guy with dreads down to here, and for a living he… well he’s a cocaine dealer. His girlfriend just shoots him a look and hits his arm and tells him ‘You get the fuck up there and help them out’ He’s just sulky ‘Yeah right, whatever’, comes upstairs and this thing’s still flying at Stacy’s face. Finally he smacks it down like ‘Welcome to Bed-Stuy!’ and on his way out the door mumbles ‘Ain’t never doin’ that again’.