Eeew eew eew eew. Ok, so Hawaii, where I am right now, has some of the nation's biggest, meanest, scariest cockroaches. In the South they call them Palmetto bugs--the enormous ones that fly, and are almost too big to squish. Shudder.
So there was one of those in my room just now, a giant one, two and half or three inches long at least, with the most loathsome wiggling antennae and legs--with most bugs, you know they have these things, but they aren't distinct when you're hosing them down with the big jug o' poison--but this bug was so very, very large that everything was like a blown-up scale model of a reasonable insect. And he was fast. And thank the lord, he didn't take it into his little cochroach brain to fly, or I would've--I don't know, but though I'm not normally afraid of bugs (because really, what can they do to me? It's the small ones that tend to be harmful, not the big ones--mosquitos, tsetse flies, etc.), but I shrieked when he zipped across the floor, evading my first attempt to squash him (and I never, ever have shoes on when there's a giant bug around).
So my mom comes in, because I'm hollering like an idiot about the giant cockroach, with this little bottle of stuff. "Is that wheel polish?" I ask, since that's what it says it is. I don't know, maybe it's a secret Hawaiian thing that wheel polish kills cockroaches better than anything (just like how putting carpenter's glue on a fresh mosquito bite makes it go away without itching at all). But no, it was poison transferred from the giant jug that lives under the kitchen sink. The little bottle wasn't doing it, however; apparently it just made him run faster. So my mom got the big jug, which also had a squirty thing, and we hosed him down good. The thing is, though, that he kept running to different parts of the room, dashing away whenever he got a good solid stream of poison. Which isn't right at all--he took dozens of direct hits. Any normal mortal insect would have curled up in a ball long before, but this one just kept darting around (in the most alarming fashion).
Finally, he made a mistake--slowed down by the poison, he attempted to make a break for it, running out into the hallway. I picked up a big wad of wrapping paper from the floor and mashed him good, even grinding him into the carpet a little. I opened the paper-wad slightly to survey the damage, and damned if the thing wasn't still wiggling his little whiskers at me. So I wrapped the ball around him and squeezed, then, at my mom's suggestion, threw him outside over the balcony. I really hope the damned chickens (and doubly-damned rooster) make short work of him sometime in the night, and prove themselves at least marginally useful. Because I am still not positive he's dead, even though his insides came out the back of him.
We don't have bugs like that in MoVal.