He was leaking guts from the first blow, a leg was missing and he was pinned down in the corner with nowhere to go. Jon took another swing and hit him good. But when he lifted the swiffer, the cockroach had vanished. Jon stood on one side of the microwave, I stood on the other, so one of us would have seen him escape. Instead, we stood there utterly confused. Jon inspected the bottom of the swiffer once more. I searched under the microwave, moving it here and there to see better. We looked back at each other and then searched to see if maybe he had run up to the shelf above. Nothing. Jon picked up the entire microwave, titling it from side to side. We both shook our heads in disbelief. “Could he have run in through the vent on the side?” We lifted the microwave and pressed both our eyeballs and the flashlight against the slats. Those holes were tiny and this thing had been thick and juicy. Bewildered, we put down the microwave. I half-heartedly looked under a sponge a few feet away, and then opened the drawers and doors of the kitchen cabinet one more time. This cockroach had pulled a Houdini.
For days afterwards, one of us would look at the other and begin to say “But where did he…” and the other would shake their head and say “I know, I know.” Or late at night as we were dozing off to sleep, we would whisper in the dark to each other, “I just want to know.”
Though the mystery still haunted us, we began to move on with our lives. We started talking of other things and spent less time standing there, staring at the last place we had seen him. But even though the microwave had since been moved to a new location in the kitchen, using it still brought back memories. “Do you think he’s in there, just getting fried every time we use this thing?”