Open Letter to the Roaches in My Apartment: A Parody

[Leedah 22]

Here is another letter I found online. -Leedah

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Open Letter to the Roaches in My Apartment

Date: 2007-09-23, 2:08PM EDT

Good afternoon, you scuttling b_st_rds.

I tried to be reasonable with you. At first, we had a stable relationship. I knew you were there, and every now and then I'd see one of you, but in general you kept quiet and had the good sense to scurry for hiding when I turned the lights on. One of you periodically stepped out of line, and had to be squashed, and then everything went back to normal. If you had just continued in that manner, we could have lived this entire year in peaceful coexistence.

But no, you had to get greedy. I began to see you more frequently, and in larger numbers. Your lights-on scurry grew slower and slower and became more of a relaxed trot, then a walk. Eventually, you had the audacity to sit right where you were and shake your head feelers at me. You had gone too far. It was time for war.

I began periodic sweeps of the apartment, armed with paper towels, and squashed anything that moved. I removed every possible food source from anywhere you might be able to reach it, even adding extra layers of wrapping to items in the fridge, just in case one of you somehow managed to make it inside. A couple of times, I even turned the lights off and stood motionless for five minutes, then flicked them back on and rained horrible death upon whichever of you had been lured out. I really thought this would have been enough to make my point.

However, you continued to defy all logic and reasoning, and to multiply and grow bolder. Three of you ran across my foot once; I killed two, but left one alive (but severely maimed) to tell the tale... clearly, you were beginning to affect my sanity, and I needed to up the ante in order to regain the upper hand in the battle for control of my apartment. So, I added the roach spray to my arsenal. This had little effect and made my apartment smell extremely questionable; I guess you vermin won that round.

I notified the management company, who has always been very responsive to any problem I have had with the place. There was some vague talk of fumigating or spraying or some other unspecified pest removal solution; somehow it kept falling through the cracks, and nothing ever happened. Well, I'm not sure who you bribed or threatened for that little stunt, but it was time to show you little 6-legged thugs that I wasn't afraid of you, no matter what kind of "connections" you had.

I had no alternative, I had to buy the roach poison traps. The way these are supposed to work is this - the cockroach smells the tasty poison/food, wanders into the trap, eats, returns to his/her hiding place, and then dies. The practical result is that they should appear to vanish from your home like magic. However, you at my apartment had grown not only bold, but complacent. After eating, you all just kinda decided to hang out for a while, and as a result died in an odd sort of corpse constellation across my kitchen floor.

The destruction was horrific. Some of your dead were being carried off by those who survived, almost like soldiers dragging the wounded into foxholes. Many of you were still twitching, apparently writhing in agony from the effects of the poison. The ravages of war are never pretty, and being a gentle person, part of me felt a little bit of remorse.

But now you know that it is, as they say, "on", and I'll push you #### all the way back to apartment 601 if I have to...

Sincerely,

Fellow Apartment Dweller/Agent of your Doom