The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron

she stayed in battle-ready position for the whole night - crouched down low, muscles tensed, and staring STARING up at the ceiling where the bug had been flying. and even that would have been fine, except for her eyes. mine is a studio apartment, and she basically hid in the hallway-to-the-outside or, once i tried to carry her back in with me, the hallway-to-the-bathroom. i say this as though there are many rooms. i don't know if it was the smell of the poison or what, but she would not go into that room for the rest of the night. So, and here we get to the point of this story. it was about quarter-sized, and it had wings like a moth, but also a fucking stinger. but i hit the bug on the third go, and it collapsed onto a book. so i was just spraying this poison everywhere. probably not the best idea because it was one of those cans that doesn't give off the nice fan of spray, but a highly-concentrated stream of it, like a hose. (seriously, it was BIG) i got this can of raid and i started squirting it up at the bug. in my defense, i really wanted to watch project runway, and this bug was just too disruptive, making all that noise, and blocking the light. and my cat was all crouching huntress style, looking up at it with huge golden eyes.įinally, i just had to do it. it was flying around my lightbulbs, and it was so big, its wings were audible, like 'bzzzzzzzzz'Īnd i couldn't reach it with the paper towels i was trying to swat it with, because the ceiling is too high. i don't cotton to roaches living in my cupboards.

however, if you are a roach, you gotta go, man, i'm sorry. where you will probably be eaten by a bird, but that's out of my hands. i will spend a very long time, in some cases, chasing you and containing you in a juice glass, and setting you free. Now, i don't like to kill things, even bugs, but i have a code: if you are a spider, or a moth, or a housefly, or one of these teeny tiny black beetles we seem to get every summer, you get to go out the window. Hooray for world fantasy award nominations!!!!!

The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron