The Murderer

Heinrich had rented the place at 401 Kenwood for a year. The small house was incredibly run down. The paint was peeling. The pollution from a nearby factory had turned it a dark gray. The windows leaked. Train tracks were fewer than twenty feet behind the house and trains ran all the time. But the things that bothered him the most were the cockroaches. When he flipped on a light, he saw them covering the floor. They climbed the walls and hid under things. He could hear them in the walls whenever the house was quiet. For the past year, he had called his landlord every week, an answering machine answering each time. “Please,” Heinrich would say quietly into the receiver. “Do something about the roaches.”

Over the weeks, his plea was eventually reduced to, “Please, roaches.”

Eventually, he had an idea. He decided to collect the roaches. He used a large trash bag to put them in whenever he could catch them. The effect, he realized, would be best if they were alive but he couldn’t figure out a way to do that. So he saved and he saved. Within three weeks, the bag was bulging. He set out for his landlord’s house, surprised the absentee maggot had actually told him where he lived. The check has to go somewhere, Heinrich thought.

Of course, the landlord lived in a huge clean house in one of the best neighborhoods.

Heinrich rang the doorbell.

No answer. He waited.

He rang the doorbell again and heard a familiar sound. Just someone approaching the door, he reassured himself.

When the door finally opened, Heinrich felt his gorge hit the back of his throat. The landlord was an enormous cockroach. He held a martini in one of his legs and wore a gaudy Christmas sweater, obnoxious green trees knitted into a red background. Heinrich threw the bag of cockroaches into the house and ran away, back to his own house that was, by law, the landlord’s house.

Three days later he received an eviction notice in the mail. There wasn’t any type of explanation, just Heinrich’s full name and the address, both scrawled out in angry cockroach handwriting.