All You Can Eat part 2

A Short Story #2

Group by group the giants slunk out the door. Chairs are stacked. Blinds are let down. The clatter fades before a final flick and the world returns to darkness when our day begins.

Our kind has to wait for darkness to explore and find food because the giants persecute us on site. You see, the giants are bigots, picking and choosing the species they want to live and die on whim. We unfortunately catch the latter.

The fish however, get a glass palace where they are fed straight into their mouths. Spending their days philosophizing while we have to hide in the walls and under the floor in a constant state of war and famine.

We tried diplomacy. My own father, a popular social justice activist in the colony, organized a crawl for the cause. Roach Lives Matter, he called it. While the giants ate, he and 22 others crawled in protest of the giants cruelty.

They crawled from the chewed-out floorboard in the sparsely used mop closet onto the open plain of off-white tile. A thin sticky film coated the ground and one-by-one marched over it into the dining area.

My dad was the bravest roach I’ve ever known, but what he possessed in courage he lacked in judgement. He presumed their numbers would help the giants perceive the error of their ways. Their presence was met with a piercing screech, a war call, prompting the entire staff to attack and end the peaceful protest.

I watched from the small split in the door frame of the mop closet. Everyone on the floor scattered in different directions but my eyes were fixated on my dad. I wanted to scream as I saw a rather unfashionable black non-slip sneaker come crashing down on him.

SMACK! His flat oval shape body absorbed much of the contact, as he was still alive when the shoe lifted. The look in his eyes immediately shifted from “panicked” to “freaking the fuck out”.

WHAM! He’s hit again. The shoe rose but he was still going, this time slower than before. The bonk broke his left antennae and with it, his instinct to survive. You could tell at this point he wasn’t sure where he was anymore.

The giant warrior’s final blow was slow and deliberate. He planted the sole of his sketcher squarely on the my father’s head and twisted. A sharp crunch echoed through the room as his exoskeleton gave way and he was smeared across the cold tile floor.

The room calmed but my gaze hadn’t shifted. My dad’s legs twitched in the air fueling my disbelief that he was dead. Impossible, I thought, as a broom swept him away and with it my boyhood belief that he was invincible.

3 out of the 23 made it back alive, but it would prove pointless to count the death toll as the massacre was only beginning.

The next day a big white vehicle with an image of an upside down roach and lightning bolts striking on it parked outside. What a silly image, I thought, we hardly go outside so why would we get struck by lightning.

A giant who was shorter than most hopped down from his booster seat and unloaded his weapons of mass destruction from the back before entering.

A menacing grin appeared on his face that could only come from the fulfillment of a perverted desire. His smile displayed rotting teeth and slightly lifted his black mustache that was no wider than his nose. He covered his grin with a mask that protected himself from the pain he inflicted on us.

Deadly gas filled The Premium Chinese Buffet, all around me I watched my friends and family lose coordination and stand paralyzed against their will. The fumes hijacked their minds and when I touched antennas with them, could tell their souls had been stolen, leaving behind hollow husks suspended mid-step.

More than two-thirds of us succumbed to the gas. Those of us who survived appeared to possess a resistance to the poison that had inflicted such agony on the colony.

I should feel lucky, but I can’t help wish I died with them. My father got to die a martyr but I live with the consequences.

Everyone turns away when they see me coming. No one will touch antennas with me. They look at me with disgust as if I was the one who gassed their family.

I’m so alone.