A recent flash fiction piece I wrote. I entered it in a contest, and received a warm thank you in return….
When we crawl out of the cracks they attack, armed with rolled-up newspapers and spray bottles, giving us the bash and smash or the heavy mist of Cyfluthrin and Pyrethroids, flattening our bodies or choking off our oxygen, a brutal and brilliant offensive – they are expert killers, just count the dead – and the survivors scatter back into the damp dark, where hundreds of others await, terrified but multiplying, ever multiplying, because that’s our salvation, our evolutionary hole card, we are Blattidae, we are 300 million years old, we are more than 4,000 species worldwide, our mothers can produce 400 offspring in a lifetime, and you’ll never conquer us all, m’ Lords, you can smash and spray and stomp all day, every tick tock of the clock, but we are invincible, unbreakable, ever multiplying, and you are well advised to remember:
One day, someday, you’ll smash and spray your own race away, but here we’ll stay, Eternal Blattidae, awaiting the moment when we’ll emerge from the damp dark
for good.
Vance Cariaga 