The Real Evil

I could blame the heat. It’s always the heat. I would try to take deep breaths, tell myself that it’s not so bad, but then sweat would start to trickle down my neck, puddle behind my knees and under my armpits. My scalp would be saturated and I could lick my upper lip and taste the saltiness of it. My whole body felt like a furnace ready to explode. I think that’s what made me do it.

Then, there was dealing with people while I was hot. Oh, the people, the insufferable clusters of people everywhere I went. People were stubborn, people were willfully ignorant, people were rude, people were abusive, and people were evil. I hated people.

See, I’d been sitting on this thing for a while. A thing I made one frenzied night. This thing I made inside one obedient cockroach with DNA from a disobedient stinkbug. All my roach had to do was merely see a human and she’d emit this odor from her abdominal glands. This was a harmful, slightly garlic, odor, that was basically arsine on steroids. I had this cockroach travel for me. And when she got stepped on, she only multiplied, scattering 16 little clones in all directions. Of course I had some test runs, a group of patient zeroes, to ensure that my girl’s little babies could complete the same task. This odor was supposed to kill a person in as little as six hours, and it did.

Her babies had babies who had babies. They wiped out the country, then continent, and then they went overseas. They hitched rides onto airplanes and pilots would open the cabin doors upon reaching their destination and discover they’d been transporting a plane full of fresh corpses. In a few weeks, the world was mine. More so, as I’ve come to realize, the world was theirs.

They couldn’t kill me; I had injected myself with another chemical combination which altered my DNA to make me immune. So there I was, alone in a world surrounded by indestructible cockroaches. I was happy for a while. I’m not anymore. I keep my number one close to me, she’s my “best friend,” but I’m beginning to think she’s not enough anymore. The world has cooled down and I’ve been thinking more clearly. I fear I may have acted a little irrationally and made a mistake. I often look at my creation, her antennae twitching, the mechanical movements of her spiny legs. I used to love her. The more I look at her, the more I realize she will never adore me or see me as her superior. I am her creator, I am her mother, and yet she doesn’t care. I love her because I made her, but she is the higher being. She may never die. And though my death won’t be by her or her offspring, I will die, one day.

I never even considered the animals. Some of the animals made it, as arsenic is used in some feeds, and they built up a tolerance which somehow withstood the new chemicals produced by my roaches. I didn’t plan for that, hadn’t even considered the animals, but I was initially grateful for it. For a while, other than the roaches, I had dogs, pigs, and a few other species. This was when I was happiest. I loved dogs. I thought I was in heaven. But, there were so many of them, and not enough of me to keep them happy. I thought the animals would be better off without humans, and they probably were to an extent. Some people had value, and their value was in giving love as well as providing for these animals. I wish I kept some of them around.

So, I’ve been in this world tip-toeing around to make sure I don’t step on any more cockroaches. They already cover most surfaces, have taken the earth as their own. I live by a beach so I can at least see and admire water animals. I needed a break from the ever-moving flittering, flying, and crawling of those heartless creatures. Even my own bathroom isn’t safe. I was dismayed to see the ceramic of my tub coated in body-to-body movement, a sea of wet-looking reddish-brown beings creating their own waves and ripples.

I’ve been losing my mind, little by little. Not in the frenzied way I once knew, but in a gradual shutting down and giving up. I saw something glimmer in a flash of silver the other day, and I pulled this chain from between the wriggling bodies. On its end there was this heart-shaped locket that I’m holding now in the palm of my hand. I opened it, as I am opening it now. On the day I found it, it only contained a picture of a smiling baby. Of course, that baby no longer exists anywhere in the world of roaches. And because of that, I cried. I saw the smile on that thoughtless little face and hated myself. I can't remember the last time I smiled. I tried and my mouth only twitched in unfamiliarity of the movement. That little baby wasn’t evil, and that being once had the capability of love for its mother. Now, I’m glaring at my own product, the smug and arrogant entity. I am going to open this locket and remove from it the thing I added the day I found it. I am going to swallow this pill, this special, super, pill, and remove one more evil thing from the world. This world may be lost, swallowed whole itself, but with nobody to step on these cockroaches, maybe one day they’ll all be gone and there can be people again. One day there will be love.