Creepy Crawlies
For the last hour or so, Dale and I have heard this weird intermittent noise. It sounded kind of crackly or crunchy or like rain on plastic, and we had no idea what it was, and it wasn’t raining. I followed the sound into the hallway from the office, but it stopped. A few more steps had me in our bedroom, where I could now hear my iPod playing. I thought maybe the previous song had had some sounds that came across weird from the distance.
It recently started up again. This time, as I walked down the hallway, it got louder and louder until I was under the trap door to the attic. It sounded like it was directly above me. The lights were off in the hall, but on in our bedroom just a few feet away. After studying the trap door for a bit, I saw a very very small gap between the end of the door and the frame around it. And in this gap was something squirming and wriggling. The scritchy sound was its freakin’ legs! In less than a minute, dozens of horrible scenarios involving roaches rushed through my head, aided by the fact that in the last couple of months we’ve seen three roaches in the house (opposed to none for the previous 15 months), and my sister recently posted a photo of a giant cockroach in one of her office’s toilets.
I suddenly pictured a massive colony of roaches in the attic, trying to squeeze their way into the house, all “Tales of the Crypt” style. I let out a loud “Dale!” then realized I was right outside of Olivia’s room, so I ran back into the office and told him we might have a roach problem. (Let me add now that Dale and I are both nearly phobic about cockroaches. We hate hate hate them and hate having to deal with them.) He came out into the hallway and I told him to look up at the attic door. We could see something like antennae waving and the shape of a buggy body in the gap.
I flipped on the light switch and got ready to tell Dale that he was going to have to be the one to check out the attic. To my great relief, the menace turned out only to be a fat junebug. It was stuck and the awful noise was its bristly little legs as it struggled to get free. I pulled the trap door down enough for the junebug to fall to the floor.
I suppose I ought to go back and get it and toss it outside. If a cat hasn’t already eaten it.
