Read Online The Cockroaches of Stay More by Donald Harington - Free Book Online

there was nothing to eat. “Fellers, if it comes to it,” a loafer posed the question, “can we eat caterpillar shit?”
    “After The Bomb,” Doc pointed out, “caterpillars would be the first to wester.”
    The one drawback of the roosterroach’s durability, longevity, adaptiveness, and imperishability was that being the last creature alive after the holocaust would pose a great problem: Who, or what, would the roosterroach eat?
    “I’d shore hate to be the last roosterroach still east,” Doc remarked to the assembled loafers.
    “Nor me neither,” said several of the other loafers, and spat, thoughtfully but decisively, each in his turn.
    “Wal, Doc,” Squire Hank Ingledew spoke up, “if you was the last, you’d have to whup me first afore you could commence eatin me, and once you’d et me, then yore biggest problem would be to figger out which part of yoreself to eat first, next.”
    The loafers guffawed, and O.D. Ledbetter suggested, “Me, I’d eat my hind end first.”
    “Haw,” said Elbert Kimber, “then you wouldn’t have no butthole to ee-liminate what you’d done et!” All the loafers snorted or snickered.
    “I reckon I’d eat my sniffwhips first,” said Tolbert Duckworth, “since I wouldn’t be needin ’em no more nohow, what with nobody else around to sniff at.”
    “Then you’d never know how much you stunk,” Squire Hank observed.
    “Wouldn’t make no difference nohow,” Lum Plowright put in. “But me, what I’d do, since it’d be my last meal on earth, I’d enjoy myself and eat my stomach first!” Several others nodded in agreement, and spat.
    “That’d wester ye right off,” Doc Swain said. “Now I tell ye fellers, assumin I could whup Squire Hank and be the last ’stead of him, and assumin I’d done already had the satisfaction of watchin that White Mouse wester a slow, painful west, I reckon I’d jist not eat none of me, but slowly starve to west, and take a last stroll down to Banty Creek and back.”
    “Might as well hop in it and drown,” Squire Hank said, and spat.
    “Naw,” said Doc Swain. “I’d jist look all around me, at ever livin thing that had westered, includin that putrefied White Mouse, and I would know that I was the very last mandamn livin thing on earth. Wouldn’t that be a satisfaction? Wouldn’t that be a reward for what-all I’d had to live through? Jist to know that? Jist to say to myself, ‘I am the last mandamned livin thing on earth?’”
    Since these were mostly heuristic questions, or rhetorical, or both, no one responded. The company of loafers lost themselves in meditation, imagining the scenario that Doc had pictured. At length, Tolbert Duckworth, who was a good Crustian and an elder in the church, remarked, “Hit shore is enough to make a body glad that our Lord Joshua Crust is gonna rapture us and save us from all sech as that, if Man Himself don’t rapture us first.”
    Several others nodded, and spat. Neither Squire Hank nor Doc Swain nodded, but they spat.

Chapter seven

    T ish Dingletoon tarried beneath the Platform long after the play-party had been broken up by Brother Tichborne and everyone had gone home or elsewhere. She wondered if she would ever again have a chance to attract Archy Tichborne to her, ever to get him within range of her pheromones when she was ready to use them. No, probably the Fate-Thing intended for her to marry a Carlotter. How vain of her to aspire to the attentions of a Holy House roosterroach. Sure, Jim Tom Dinsmore would be glad to have her and would take her to live in the Smock if she would marry him, but he was a puny and unsightly specimen, compared with Archy Tichborne.
    Might just as well be getting on back, Tish told herself, and crawled out from under the Platform and turned her steps sadly homeward. But as she sought the path to the hollow log that was the Dingletoon home, she bumped into one of the fingertips of Man, who lay prone with his arms outstretched in the grass of