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Pilgrims

We stumble through the door of our new Florida home at two in the morning, doubled over from exhaustion. My father and grandpa follow closely behind, parking the U-Haul down the street. That makes seven of us in the 800-square-foot house. We joke that there’s plenty of space—more than 100 square feet a person—but as my three siblings, grandpa, and I gather some sleeping bags on the floor of the cubelike bedroom, the joke falls flat.

The carpet is warm beneath us, and with the mold-scented air, none of us are sleeping. Earlier, when we’d entered the bedroom, my grandpa had opened the closet door and saw a cockroach, legs poised, that he swears was the size of his hand. Rubber-looking antennae hung from its face, and it scurried across the floor and out of sight, unnaturally, like it was on wheels. Before any of us could move we’d lost the thing, and none of us slept all night, afraid we might wake up with it crawling across our bodies. We lay still, blankets pulled high, as if staying still could make us safe.

 

The Haunting

Sometimes you don’t see the cockroach at first. You see the smear it leaves behind, its shell cracked down the middle, and tiny, brittle legs kicked out like dropped pins.

In Florida, they’re everywhere. The densest population in the country, with one-third of homes reporting an infestation every year. The worst kind are German cockroaches, which are flat and fast and quiet. The smallest of the species, they can disappear behind the fridge, slip through the seams of the cabinets, press themselves into the thin dark just beneath the dishwasher. You don’t know they’re there until one darts across the floor.

They offer no honey, no pollination. Only movement where there shouldn’t be any, a shadow thinning and gathering again as the light shifts. Once you’ve seen one, you start to expect, deep in your body rather than your mind, that they’ve already infiltrated the rest of your home. The rest are already spread through the house. Even the clean rooms. Even your sleep.

 

The Reverend Dr.

We move to Florida because of my father’s job at the church, and we’re soon introduced to the Reverend Dr., a smooth-talking Presbyterian minister who smiles a lot, keeps a close-trimmed goatee, and shaves his head bald every morning, as if grooming were a kind of daily absolution.

I like him at first because he’s nice to me in the way adults rarely are. He asks about school, remembers things I say, laughs when I recall stories. The congregation likes him because he fits the part: nice house, two daughters, a wife who works as a school psychologist. Everything in his life is clean lines, and no rough edges show through the surface.

My father likes him most of all. He was now the associate pastor for a church nearly ten times the size of the church he led in Wisconsin. For my father, the Reverend Dr. is something like a metamorphosis for his career. An opportunity he hadn’t expected and wouldn’t dare refuse.

 

Ditto #1

My younger brother Simon was devastated when, at four years old, his collection of pet ladybugs died simultaneously. He kept the bugs in an orange Skechers shoebox, lined with brown grass and leaves he picked from the backyard, garnished with deer droppings, which he called “chocolate chips” and gave to the ladybugs as treats.

More fittingly than he knew, he named them all Ditto. He carried the box with him everywhere. Each batch lived about a week before suffocation or starvation. Sometimes a misstep in the hallway finished them. Usually, it was a combination of these factors. When they died, he couldn’t bring himself to clear them out. He’d just add more grass, more leaves, more Dittos. By the end of the month, the box was layers deep. You could see the strata of his grief in mulch and wing. He carried it like it still breathed and fed it like something inside might wake.

 

Ring of Fire

The first time I step in a fire ant nest, I don’t see it. It’s my second day of middle school in Florida. I’m standing in a patch of rootless sand by the pickup line, where the grass gives out and the earth turns to dust. The ground is soft, almost warm. I let it crawl over the edges of my sneakers and settle into my socks. For a moment, it feels like comfort.

Then something bites. Then another. Then another. I look down and my ankles are swarming. Fire ants, hundreds of them, moving like a necklace tightening around my skin. I don’t scream. I just run straight into the van as my mom pulls up, kicking off my socks and hammering my feet against the floorboards. My legs are already marked, red and rising. She asks what happened. I can’t explain so I cry instead. I cry until we pull into the driveway.

Later, I learn that fire ants don’t just sting. They anchor themselves with their jaws, then pivot in circles, injecting venom in a ring. A full rotation of pain. Lying in bed that night, legs hot, skin humming, I could still feel them moving, tracing circles beneath the sheets.

 

How Boys Are

Church is the only thing that goes well. The Reverend Dr. lets us play Street Fighter at his house when we’re over for dinner. He knows all the combos—Hadouken, Shoryuken, the spinning kicks—and I watch his hands blur across the controller like he’s casting spells. He plays guitar and sings and tells us about his old band. Says he should’ve been in a ska group, not the pulpit. We swim in his pool and he grills burgers. He pays just enough attention to make me feel like I matter.

I think of these things when he starts telling me about his own middle school years, how he used to be, the things he used to do. His voice drops and something shifts. The jokes get slower, slicker. He tells me, half-smiling, he’ll have to watch me around his daughters. Says he knows how thirteen-year-old boys are—he remembers. I laugh, like I’m supposed to. I nod, like it’s normal. No one else seems to notice what’s being said. Or if they do, they don’t say anything. He keeps talking and I keep listening.

 

Ditto #2

I sleep in the gap between a bunk bed and my sister’s frame, the mattress on the floor pressing into the baseboard heater. My camouflage sleeping bag is zipped to my chin. There’s barely space to turn over. Around me, my siblings breathe in different rhythms, blanketed in quilts and cartoon sheets, the room thick with heat and the smell of feet and fabric softener.

Sometimes I imagine the house from above—like an ant farm cracked open. Six bodies stacked in boxes. My bed, I imagine, is the bottom layer. I don’t know how long we’ll live like this, only that no one ever clears the old layers out. You just add more. More blankets. More bodies. More things to bury and forget.

 

Mimics

Florida is full of animals that mimic each other, some deadly and others safe. Young children are taught red on yellow, kill a fellow; red on black, venom lack like a nursery rhyme to distinguish between the king and coral snakes, the latter of which can kill you with one bite. The slight red tint is enough to distinguish the brutally stinging fire ant from their harmless contemporaries. Palmetto bugs are larger than their German cockroach counterparts but will not infest your house. Alligators are mostly harmless, but their wiry, more pointed crocodile relatives will hunt you if you get too close. You learn these distinctions quickly because you must. They become part of your daily rhythm.

 

Ditto #3

People are trickier. They have no stripes to tell you who is poisonous. They sneak up on you, when you’re most vulnerable, telling you they are harmless when really, they’ve already infested your home.

 

Under the Floorboards

When the Reverend Dr. is arrested the first time, it’s a Saturday. I wake up close to noon and find his daughters in our living room, their knees tucked up on the couch, cereal bowls balanced on their laps, cartoons flickering in the background. We take them to the community pool and get fast food on the way back. We wait as my father bails theirs out of jail.

The headline flashes across the local news that afternoon: “Pastor Arrested after Allegedly Grabbing Child’s Neck.” We turn off the TV before the clip finishes. By dusk, my father is home again, and the Reverend Dr. is with him. They’re laughing off the incident blaming some “lying piece of shit kid in the neighborhood” who had called the cops. They talk like it’s all a joke.

That night, the AC kicks on and off like always. The hallway light slips in under the door, just enough to cast the shape of my dresser on the wall. I count the shadows. I don’t remember doing that before.

 

Unclean Things

You learn, after living in the south for long enough, that cockroaches aren’t really pests in the way mice or rats are. They’re residents, older than the stucco and bolder than the stray cats, they clatter across pool decks and vanish into palm fronds. They wait upside down on the ceiling fan until it spins and they drop like seeds shadowed against the white tile floors.

You learn to check your shoes before you put them on. You shake out the towels. You tap the toothbrush on the counter before it goes in your mouth. No one needs to tell you, but sooner or later, you just start doing it.

At night, they make a hush—a flicker across the tile, a hum under the fridge. You think you hear them even when you don’t. You start to believe they’re watching you sleep. They survive the sprays, the traps, the boric acid and bleach. You kill one and two more appear, as if summoned. As if your fear is fertile.

 

Molting

Not long after the arrest, the Reverend Dr. meets with an older man from church, a widower. Over coffee, he tells him he did it—he grabbed the boy by the neck—and that the kid had it coming. The man doesn’t tell the police. He tells my father.

 

Coping

A teacher of mine used to teach Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis to her classes every fall. Afraid of cockroaches herself, she would bring a piñata into class, promising to let us release any pent-up feelings towards the novella when we finished discussing it. She stood back, smiling as the students took the wooden baseball bat, and released satisfying thumps on the piñata’s body. The first crack would split the paper shell. The second would cave in the body. I think now that she must’ve known how futile it was. The cockroach never really dies. Not in the story, not in our heads. Still, it gave us something to swing at. Gave us some shape for our unease.

 

Ditto #4

Simon starts making himself throw up on Sundays. He says his stomach hurts, that he can’t make it through the sermon. My sister begins to stay in bed with cramps that never seem to end. My mother’s migraines return. We show up to church enough to be seen, but never long enough for the Reverend Dr. to interact with us. I hear whispered conversations between my mom and father about how my father needs to stop the Reverend Dr. from talking to us, or else we will stop going to church entirely. My father says it is probably better if we stay home. We need the money, after all.

 

Pest Control

Before Florida, before the cockroaches, there were bats. In Wisconsin, they’d get in through the attic vent, flutter down through the walls and into the bedrooms. I’d wake to the sound of my father cursing, barefoot in the hallway, swinging my mother’s tennis racket in wide arcs through the dark.

The bat would dive and wheel, its soft body brushing ceilings and lampshades, its wings like paper fans. We knew the drill: blankets over the head, curl up in a ball, stay still. It was always frightening, but never new. Eventually, the racket would connect. There’d be a soft thud, a silence. My father would hold the stunned thing up by one leathery wing, drop it into a Walmart bag, and knot the plastic tight.

He never looked inside the bag once it was tied. He would just drop it in the outside bin, come back in barefoot, breath still catching in his throat, and eventually fall asleep again. I think now it wasn’t the bat he was afraid of. It was what it meant to miss. To swing and miss and let something small and flapping slip through the rooms while his children hid beneath the covers. 

In Florida, he stops swinging entirely. The roaches scatter across the baseboards and walls, and it’s my mother, my siblings, and I who grab the shoes. Who deliver the smacks and clean the streaks from the walls. My father stands back, shaking his head like the fear is beneath him. But he does not lift a hand, and we stop expecting him to.

 

Photophobia

Most often, you find them at night. It’s never when you’re looking for them, but it’s when the light flicks on that you catch the roach mid-motion. A pause, a beat, then the dash for cover. They vanish behind the molding, slip into the mouth of an air vent, and wedge themselves somewhere too small and too dark to follow. You have to kill them before they disappear because once they’re gone, you won’t see them again. The light reveals something they can’t outrun. And for a second, you both know it.

 

The Trial

When my father is fired, we do not know whether to be devastated or relieved. The Reverend Dr.’s wife comes to our house after she “accidentally punched herself in the face,” leaving a purple-green bruise on her eye. We begin exchanging stories. 

I repeat what I remember—his stories about being thirteen, the way he laughed as he told them, how he asked if I ever snuck onto my phone late at night, if I ever searched for certain things, if I ever needed help finding them. I remember the way he lowered his voice when he said those things, like we were both in on something, like he was giving me advice. I didn’t think it was dangerous. I thought it was what grown-ups did when they liked you—they let you in. But when I saw their faces as I said it, I knew: I had spoken the wrong truth. I had been carrying it like it was nothing. Now it felt heavy in the air between us, like something foul had been let loose, and I was the one who opened the door. 

I tell my parents I do not wish to give testimony at the trial. I’m embarrassed to share this information in front of a crowd and do not believe it will do anything anyway. My parents and siblings go without me. They return crying. Nothing is done in retribution.

 

Crown of Vermin

Sometimes in the trenches of my subconscious, like clockwork, images appear in my mind, and I dream we are back in the Reverend Dr.’s church. He stands in the pulpit, backlit by a stained-glass window warped with age and heat. The image in the glass is a man with a crown of thorns, eyes hollowed out, holding a lamb in his arms. The glass has melted in places. A red ooze that looks like blood has seeped into the animal’s wool. Vines push through the seams, thick, black, and knotted. They snake across the man’s arms, through his ribs, and twist around the lamb in his hands. The head drops first and the body follows.

The sanctuary is hushed, like everyone is waiting for the Reverend Dr. to speak. My parents kneel by the pulpit, mouths moving in silence. They don’t look up. The red carpet beneath them had gone dark, almost black, soaked with something that hasn’t dried.

I stand in the back pew and watch. I can’t move or speak. The pulpit burns with a low red light. The Reverend Dr.’s voice rises. It isn’t a sermon, it’s not even words, but the sound of something splitting open, and still they pray.

 

When God Made the Cockroach

He made it to last. He made it to outlive everything—its predators, extermination, nuclear wars. He made it to live everywhere. He let it crawl between floorboards and inside walls, let it thrive in the places no one wants to look. He made it something you can kill a hundred times over, but never really get rid of.

I turn on the light and wait to see what moves.

 

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GABRIEL HOLTON lives near Chicago and works in nonprofit communications. Originally from Florida, he writes essays and fiction.

 

Featured image by Matheus Ferreira, courtesy of Unsplash.