Skip to main content

Excerpt

Excerpt

Kockroach

The
world, Kockroach discovers, is marvelously hospitable when your
skin is pale and you walk on two legs.

Each morning now, just before dawn, his gut full to bursting, he
scurries around corners, through marvelous dank alleyways strewn
with aromatic scraps, to a pile of wooden cartons leaning against
an old brick wall. He climbs over two cartons, tunnels under a
third, arrives at a crate with one edge shattered. Through the
shattered timbers lays a comfortably narrow space where he can
sleep with pressure on three sides of his body. He carefully takes
off his coverings, folds them neatly, grooms himself for an hour or
more, and then slips into the narrow space.

At dusk he awakens, grooms himself again, cleans every inch of his
coverings with his teeth, places them on his body in the precise
order he learned from the picture, and slithers out of his carton,
emerging into the night to feed.

Behind almost every building there are containers left out for the
great monstrous collectors to devour in the morning and from these
containers Kockroach gorges himself nightly. Soggy breads, rotted
fruit, the wilted leaves of great heads of lettuce, peelings from
all sorts of starchy vegetables, porridgy mixtures congealed into
delicious balls of gluck.

In his old body it was the starches and sugars for which he
hungered, but this body eats everything and savors, most of all,
the knuckly joints of meat he finds in the containers. Sometimes,
if he is lucky, the meat he scavenges is covered by a clutch of
writhing maggots. He sucks off the maggots, shakes his head wildly
as they slide down his throat, and then pulls off the red blooded
meat with his teeth.

From puddles, or from snaking green tubes, he washes down his
nocturnal feasts with water.

There is far more in the containers than even he can eat, but this
bounteous buffet is not without its risks. If he makes too much
noise, rattling the containers as he searches, sometimes humans
stick their heads out of windows and shout phrases at him which he
dutifully shouts back. "Get the hell out of there?" "Ain't you got
no self-respect?" "Get a job, you bum."

Other times he is forced to share his food with creatures that fill
him with a long-ingrained terror, slippery rats, narrow-muzzled
dogs, raccoons, and, worst of all, cats, with their flat ugly faces
and their quick paws. He remembers these brutal felines having lazy
sport with the young cockroaches that scurried carelessly within
the ambit of their gaze. They would flick out a paw, knock a
cockroach on its back, lethargically pierce its abdomen with a
claw. Even though he now stands five times taller than the largest
cat, fear overwhelms him whenever he sees such a creature. But
still he eats. Since when did fear ever long stop a cockroach from
eating.

Once, when he regurgitated his food out of long habit, a rat rushed
between his legs and began to slurp. He has since learned there is
no need to regurgitate in this body. His teeth are ugly yet
marvelous things, and once he pulps the food in his mouth he can
swallow it straight away.

He should be hugely content in his new life, he is living a
cockroach's dream, food and shelter, a nice brown suit and leather
wing tips.

But something, something is missing.

Excerpted from KOCKROACH © Copyright 2011 by Tyler Knox.
Reprinted with permission by William Morrow. All rights
reserved.

Kockroach
by by Tyler Knox

  • Genres: Fiction
  • hardcover: 368 pages
  • Publisher: William Morrow
  • ISBN-10: 0061143332
  • ISBN-13: 9780061143335