Takeout

K Anand Gall

Takeout

“I’d really rather you weren’t in the house,” Bernice says to the cockroach ambling across the basement carpet.

“Don’t go anywhere,” she says, standing from her knitting and searching the storeroom for a plastic takeout container, last used to escort a mouse to the woods out back. Before that, she had used it to store last year’s garlic seeds before planting them in front of the chicken wire that surrounded the garden. She’d read that garlic would keep the rabbits out.

Bernice squats by the edge of the couch and tips the container on its side. The roach turns and runs to the edge of the carpet, flattening himself between seam and baseboard.

Bernice sighs and says, “Stay there.”

“Fuck you,” the roach says, but stay he does. Humans, he thought, had little appreciation for spaces such as these in a household: electrical outlets, cracks in walls, pipes, old keyholes. Places no cups could seal, places immune to the leverage required for squashing. He stills himself and watches her stand, groaning with one hand on her back and the other on her knee as she rights herself.

“Are you still there?” Bernice asks, returning with takeout container and, now, a pen. When she anchors the pen beneath his abdomen and gently taps his sensitive cerci—how did she know they were there?—he is so surprised that he lurches from his hiding spot and instinctively runs for the shelter of the takeout container. His hard body clicks against curved plastic walls.

He seems to go so willingly that Bernice doesn’t have the heart to flush him or, worse, crush him. She had never liked the feel of squashed skeleton, be it endo or exo. Two mice ago, she’d inadvertently crushed the mouse’s spine while trying to catch it in the takeout container. Instant. Took so little effort. She watched in horror as the front half of its body writhed against its paralyzed hindquarters. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she had whispered, scooping it into the takeout container where soon the front half also stilled. “I was trying to save you.” She slid the mouse out of the container into a patch of periwinkle under the catalpa tree in the backyard. She said a prayer but didn’t bury it. Just in case.

Bernice considers leaving the roach contained on the dining room table and releasing him after her phone call with the lawyer. She promised to call this morning to discuss the probate on Walt’s estate. But she keeps thinking of the way the roach had so willingly climbed into the container, a surrender that Bernice herself found difficult when life didn’t go her way.

“I’m taking you outside,” she says. The lawyer could wait five more minutes. “Your people have long known how to fend for themselves.”

“Lady, you think I don’t know the way back to your house?” the roach mutters under its breath, bracing himself when Bernice stumbles into the soft divot of a mole’s surface trail. Walt had hired the lawn company to apply Dylox, scheduled it sometime in the winter, months before he died. They had argued about it when he brought up the idea. Bernice wanted to catch and release the moles, had even reached out to a woman on the neighborhood forum who said she’d offer her services for 30 dollars a mole. No, honey, the woman had replied when Bernice asked the woman where she planned to release the moles. My traps only catch. They don’t release. When the lawn company had shown up a week after the funeral, the man explained to her that the Dylox wouldn’t kill the moles, just the food source, the grubs, and the moles would leave to find their meals elsewhere. Apparently the exodus was still in progress.

Bernice walks into the woods behind the house, down toward the vernal creek that regularly deposits plastic soda bottles and cigarette butts from the thoroughfare whenever it rains. She stops not as far back as the garter snake the cat brought to the front door last week, but farther than the one that had caught itself under the trash bin, the new bin she’d gotten for free after the garbage man threatened to crush her old one and she’d called the company to report him. She stops at a cluster of chain-sawed pieces of decomposing wood, remnants of the ash tree she and Walt had planted when they bought the house. In the past few years it had been girdled by Emerald ash borers. Walt had cut it down weeks before his relapse. With that tree down, the hemlock moved to the front lines in the battle against infestation, shivered in the wind against the rumor of wooly adelgids.

She sits on one of the remaining stumps of the ash. She loved that tree, had never considered that she might outlive it.

So much effort to preserve life. And to what end?

She peels back the plastic lid of the takeout container. She remembers reading somewhere that cockroaches can hold their breath for 40 minutes. She considers replacing the lid, leaving the roach tucked in its plastic prison among the ash stumps. Maybe just until she’d spoken with the lawyer. Maybe longer. How long until the oxygen runs out in a pint-sized container from a hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant?

While Bernice considers the flip-sided nature of a tear-away plastic lid—euthanasia or murder? mercy or cruelty?—the roach swings his antennae side to side and up and down. Bernice leans in, squints her eyes. She remembers reading that the antenna were sensory organs, something akin to her nose and ears. Could he smell her grief through the tangy filter of cheap plastic? She imagines herself plucking those antennae clean off his head.

“Humans,” he sneers. They had such little appreciation for moments such as these, or their own capacity for outliving them.

—

K Anand Gall (she/her, they/them) is an overeducated writer who can’t commit to a single genre or gender, with writing appearing recently in Glassworks, voidspace, Thin Air Magazine, and The Journal. Connect on X and Instagram @kanandgall or at kanandgall.com.