Cursory internet research leads to instructions for killing and baffled acknowledgment of their durability as a species (specious claims that they’d survive an atomic blast). I learned that they slumber like readers in our old books and are known to annotate the pages with urine and excrement, that they like the damp undersides of old leaves and cardboard. That the fipronil in roach traps leaves them drunk, burrowing into each other while emitting a stale, necrotic musk. That the larger ones eat the smaller ones, transmitting the chemical as they hiss through spiracles and die.

Cal Freeman
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