In the apartment we lived in on Saturday night, Tobyjoe moved the toilet in our bathroom for a reason I am unsure of. We had a few faceless visitors over at the time. The apartment had wall-to-wall carpeting the kind of carpeting that contains puffy raised sections, like carpeted clouds seen from above. Intermixed with the raised sections were bits of recessions almost like bodies of water. As a matter of fact, if one were to fill the carpet with a half inch of water, and it wasn’t immediately absorbed, it would fill the recessions leaving the puffy parts to rise above like little islands.

While chatting with our visitors in the living room, I noticed that a few small roaches were heading our way, darting across the bumpy carpet like little balls of lint caught on a breeze. I saw them and ignored them for as long as I could which came with ease given the fact the apartment was predominantly brown and very dark. Eventually, they become more plentiful and the new ones were much larger; they were about the size of a large man’s open palm. They were coming out from a hole in the wall from behind the toilet. Tobyjoe kicked open the bathroom window in hopes of them running out through there instead of through the living room. As I watched him do this, I noticed a few dead turtles on the tile floor of the bathroom. They’d given up. I returned to the living room. The bugs continued running toward us. I stood on the sofa trying to get away from them all, our guests stood on the couch behind me. It was then I noticed our fish tank in the corner. I had forgotten about our fish tank.

We lifted books and threw them down onto the massive roaches. Each direct hit would punctuate with a loud crunching sound and then yellow goo would ooze out from below the heavy books like peanut butter between two crackers. And if I didn’t loathe roaches so much, I may have had fun.

Then, the beetles came and one of our guests new its arachnid name. I looked at him or her as if they were crazy. I couldn’t care less what type of massive beetle this was. Before I could scold them for caring about the beetle, the snakes came. I knew they should be kept alive because. They would eventually eat the bugs even though the bugs were much larger than the snakes. Tobyjoe took the snakes and then began throwing them into the fish tank. The snakes began to eat the fish.

I began to cry.

Last night, I lived in an apartment with red walls. The carpeting was brown. A girl came out of the bathroom and said, “There are snakes all over the walls.