They say that the Asiatic cockroach is going extinct
They say Mr Putin crawls into basements and laundry rooms, into ventilation shafts to inject cockroaches with radioactive waste.
They say that's why he closed down the communal garbage shoots.
They say he wore a Halloween mask booked out a theatre with the people inside wouldn't let them leave.
They say he performed Blueberry Hill over and over again so embarrassing
for everyone involved until he got bored shot the pianist with a stolen glass Kalashnikov filled with vodka. They say when BB King slumped against the piano he was so dehydrated that his blood oozed out of him like spawn.
They say they can hear him at night creeping in the spaces behind the walls where the
rooms of their apartment don't quite meet up.
They say he likes killing cockroaches. When he was a small boy in the exercise yard people said that cockroaches were impervious
that their blood was antifreeze, that if you removed the head they survived for six weeks
even then they only died because they couldn't eat,
that their DNA was so simple and functional, such a triumph of design, that it couldn't be disrupted by mere radiation hang on!
that they owned Chernobyl, were thick on the ground and on the corpses,
even a pregnant one can slip through the gap between the wall and the skirting board.
They say Flight MH370 was hijacked months ago and now finally has been used. The bodies at the crash site are rotting and full of insects the European passports strewn about are suspiciously new.
Everyone in the CIA is Jewish.
Everyone who works in the Pentagon commutes from Chechnya.
Roaches were hiding in Mrs Thatcher’s hair egging her on, after the nuclear winter they will diversify to fill all the dust dulled empty niches and office buildings.
For now they politely hurry out of our way when we walk in reclaim our space with a sudden artificial light grimace with disgust at the grime at the tarnished surfaces and the scuttling creatures who so quickly conceal themselves.
Mr Putin is terrified that one day a cockroach will just sit on the kitchen bench and watch him. He will crush that one with a Faberge egg.
Ruth Corkill
Ruth Corkill is a physicist in New Zealand working on computer models and analysis for a geomagnetism research team. She has just returned from three months studying poetry and fiction at The Iowa Writers Workshop Summer Graduate Program and she has a minor in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington. Her work has recently appeared or is upcoming in New Welsh Review, The Bristol Short Story Competition Anthology, The Dominion Post, Hue and Cry, The Listener, Jaam, Salient, and Landfall.
