While standing at the Maui airport, Andreas and I watched an inch-long cockroach scuttle out from under a hedge. Dre remarked on it, and wondered cockroaches have such a bad reputation.

“Is it like rats, where they’re blamed for the plague?”

I mused that sure: maybe they carry diseases, but part of it was that you know if you see one, that there’s dozens around. They travel in packs.

“And,” I finished, “they’re really hard to kill. They’re not like ants, where you put out a trap and they stop. You can’t squish a cockroach.”

Andreas nodded. Moments passed. We waited for our ride. I shifted absent-mindedly from foot to foot.

Something made a noise under the sole of my right flip-flop.

The cockroach, it seemed, had scurried beneath my foot. And I, it seemed, had stepped on it. I looked down and saw that it wasn’t moving, and something had soft and wet had squished out of one end.

Andreas was mortified. I was disgusted, but shrugged and whimpered, “Shit, I guess I was wrong.”

We moved away from the unmoving roach and tried not to think about it. We couldn’t stop glancing at it, though, and Andreas eventually kicked it into the street, where it promptly spasmed into life and scurried in a zig-zag along the curb. We shrieked and it stopped moving again. I think it was just reflex that made it scurry. Regardless, a tour bus carrying elderly asian tourists ran over it a minute later, and it didn’t move again after that.

So, I was wrong: it’s not so hard to kill a cockroach.