Story of a Cockroach. Carmen Gil

      Story of a Cockroach

      Text © 2011 Carmen Gil

      Illustrations © 2011 Sonja Wimmer

      This edition © 2011 Cuento de Luz SL

      Calle Claveles 10 | Urb Monteclaro | Pozuelo de Alarcón | 28223 Madrid | Spain | www.cuentodeluz.com

      Original title in Spanish: Historia de una Cucaracha

      Translated into English by Cálamo & Cran (Nedra Rivera Huntington)

      ISBN: 978-84-15241-20-1

      All rights reserved

      Mini-Animalist Series

      of

      a

      Story

      Cockroach

      by Carmen Gil & Sonja Wimmer

      & Anastasia

      Like everyone else of my species for the past three hundred thousand years, I like to live in nice, warm, safe places.

      Myself in particular, I prefer the cracks along the baseboards in the living room, the gaps in the kitchen cupboards or the bathroom pipes.

      But don’t think my life is easy. It isn’t! Over my long year of existence, I can have up to four hundred children. And so, as you may imagine, I spend my days surrounded by crying baby cockroaches needing to be fed. Fortunately, they’ll make do with any old thing. They will just as happily wolf down a ball of lint as a strip of cardboard.

      My name is Anastasia and I’m a cockroach.

      It’s no surprise that I suffer from broomophobia.*

      Of course, there are those who prefer to exterminate me with a stomp of their foot or by using one of those sprays that household cockroaches are so afraid of. But in any case, getting squished to a pulp is better than being boiled to death slowly in a witch’s cauldron—witches absolutely love tossing us into their potions—or ending up fried in a pan, which is what happens to my brothers in some tropical countries.

      The truth is, I just can’t understand it: people love and appreciate other insects that are similar to me. In fact, they find my cousins the crickets so likeable that human children adopt them and lovingly feed them chunks of tomato. And can you imagine? They are so popular that one of them, Jiminy Cricket, was the lead actor in a famous movie and since then all he ever does is sign autographs. He even bought himself a luxurious mansion in Miami!

      * a terrible fear of brooms.

      Although I’m known for being a night owl, I’m a responsible, peace-loving cockroach who does no harm to anybody. I don’t bite like mosquitoes; I don’t gnaw on things like rats; and I don’t annoy people with my noisy song like cicadas.

      Yet humans still hate me and I don’t know why. In fact, they detest me. For some mysterious reason, every time they see me, they screech, shout, flap their arms around and, most of the time, end up trying to smash me.