Her First Apartment Once, when she was young, and living in her own apartment for the very first time, a cockroach crawled into her ear. Cockroaches can’t walk backwards, so it just kept crawling deeper until it got wedged in there and stuck in the wax. She could hear it constantly moving, a tickling flutter searching for escape. She imagined its little cockroach head frantically jerking back and forth inside her own skull. She’d freaked out at first. Woke up her next door neighbor pounding on his apartment door. Would it try to eat it’s way out? She wondered. Could it get through her ear drum? Was that pounding in her ears her heart? She remembered hearing somewhere that roaches could live for weeks without air. “Are you Ok?” “No! There’s something in my ear. And I think it’s a cockroach.” “What?” “Tweezers. Something.” While he rifled the medicine cabinet, she imagined it scuttling over the tiny bones of her inner ear, scurrying like a desperate hungry bullet, headed straight for her brain. He worked with a flashlight and tweezers beside her, peering and probing for only a minute before announcing “Whatever it is, I can’t see it. We’re gonna have to go to the emergency room.”
She cried a little then.
On the way, she kept thinking about a story she’d heard on NPR the day before. A girl who couldn’t stop scratching herself. She’d worn away a bald spot on her head, then worn away the skin too. Her fingernails scraped at her skull, thinning the bone. The itching was a torment. She couldn’t not scratch it. One night while sleeping, she finally cracked through, like a baby chick in