Cats aren’t the only ones curious

Dorrit
Dorrit
Jul 25, 2017 · 2 min read

The war of cockroaches was hardly deafening. It was quiet, but brilliantly so.

Wind horns blew the big flying roaches off their course. Rotatory blades shredded wings and then bodies. Plastic clad roaches braving the deadly chalk to confine the opposition. The sort.

The start was all murky. An insignificant argument. Differences are common place, even in cockroaches it seems.

“We are the bigger ones. You must stay away from our territory.”

“But we are small, we do not affect you.”

“Now, you do. Would you like us to put a stop to that?”

It escalated.

Members of neither side knew the point of the war, so sternly taken on by the few.

But slowly, the hate speech and the fever rose, and then it became a factor of if they’re fighting us, then why shouldn’t we?

It didn’t matter that this was simultaneous on both sides, that they were bringing the fight to themselves, that there was no point or end to the matter, except for the swat that would kill them all.

Slowly, the war changed into a competition of abilities. They were fighting because of their size, and now they were fighting with their size. The smaller roaches slipped into miniscule places. The larger ones played eagle and attempted to pick up and drop their smaller counterparts someplace else.

Despite the lack of a concrete aim for the war, it gave them an objective for their otherwise pointless lives. Training, teaching, preaching was in full swing. And this then lead to a whole lot of commenting and then, discourse.

The deaths though, we’re sacred. Celebrated, despite being of their own design. Each week saw them sitting in a circle honoring the parts of the dead they managed to scavenger, no matter of the side they came from. There was respect, and solidarity, forgiveness, death dignifying them, better killed by your own kind than by the humans. They might have been fighting each other, but in the face of the humans, they were together.

Playing with the human toys was the best thing that came out of the entire ordeal. All was good when it was new and harmless (relatively).

Till it wasn’t. This particular toy wasn’t so harmless after all. A grenade, a hiding place(?), a stone fruit, a curiosity. They weren’t cats but it killed them all.

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