Carlo Paulo Pacolor
TRANS. BY Soleil Davíd
The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Cockroach
He was a good kid, so he always asked for permission before doing anything.
One time he wanted to be a freshwater crab, so he first called his mother at the hospital where she worked. He asked, “Please, ’Nay, can I be a freshwater crab?”
“Yes, son, yes,” his mother answered, quickly putting the phone down.
“Why a crab?” his amused older sister asked.
He explained that last Saturday a fishmonger came past their house bearing freshwater crabs, and when their father bought some, the boy saw how strong they were, how their pincers made people cry out. His older sister snickered.
When his mother came home from work, she hurried to the room where his father was, ignoring the boy, who had tucked his hands into his thighs, scuttling crablike. His parents also ignored him when the boy came into their room and tried to climb onto the bed, still imitating what he had seen: the crabs trying to climb but slipping in their scrambling attempts.
His mother said to his father, “So at dawn they brought a teenager to us. The mother had no idea what to do—his intestines were hanging out of him. The mother was saying, ‘Sew them back in, please, sew them back in.’ But I couldn’t tell her that I couldn’t sew his intestines back. Well, someone had broken into their house and the teenager fought back. As if he was any match for them. After all that, they still took everything.”
The boy hit his head falling on the floor, but he didn’t cry. His mother told him to be careful, his father told him he could no longer be a crab. They called for his sister, who told him how painfully crabs die, how their soft innards boil in their hard shells. “Do you want your intestines boiled?”
The boy was never a freshwater crab again.
The next week, he called his mother at the hospital again and asked, “Can I be a catfish? I want to be a catfish!”
“Whatever you want,” his mother answered with a yawn.
“Why a catfish?” asked his older sister, amused.
He explained that last Saturday he and his father had gone to the fish market where he saw catfish thrashing in their nets, flopping about even when they were taken out of the water, looking very much alive. He said it was amazing that there were fish that could breathe on land, and they were funny, too; they even had mustaches! His older sister smiled.
After dinner, they were surprised when the boy went into the bathroom without being told, shouting, “I’ll go, I’ll go!”
While tidying up the dinner table, his mother told his father, “His flesh was all burnt. If I were him, I wouldn’t have gone back to rescue anybody. They weren’t even related or anything. There were reporters all over. You’ll see it on the news later: Hero Ends Up in Hospital.”
The bathroom faucet kept running. It was while watching the evening news that his parents finally noticed the sound of water pouring into the drain. No wonder the boy hadn’t come out of the bathroom.
This is what they saw when they opened the door: the boy lying on the bathroom floor, body thrashing about, two lines of toothpaste drawn on his upper lip.
“You’re wasting water,” his mother said, pulling him to his feet.
“You can’t be a catfish anymore,” said his father, wiping off his toothpaste mustache.
They called for his older sister to get him dressed, and as she powdered his back, she asked, “Have you seen how mischievous catfishes are killed?”
“No,” the boy answered.
“They grab them by the tail and smash their heads on a rock. Do you want your head to explode?”
The boy was never a catfish again.
But a good kid always asks for permission.
The next week he wanted to be a frog. He called his mother and, when he heard her voice, he asked, “Frog, ’Nay, can I please? Please?”
“Of course, son, of course,” and her voice disappeared at the other end of the line as a patient came in.
“Why a frog?” asked his older sister, bemused.
“They’re hard to catch,” the boy answered, making leaping motions with his hands. Last Saturday, he’d gone to the fields with his father and his father’s friends to catch frogs. When he caught one, it slipped out of his hands and no matter how many times he tried, he couldn’t catch it again in its agile leaping. “Like this, Até, like this.” His older sister laughed.
That night, when his parents went to bed, his mother embraced his father and said, “If I were the wife, I wouldn’t want to live. She couldn’t stop crying—who wouldn’t cry if their husband was paralyzed? I think he’s an alcoholic; he fell asleep at the wheel and his car almost ended up under a truck.”
Suddenly, a crash was heard from the boy’s room, followed by another. The parents jumped up, as did the older sister. When they turned the lights on, they saw that the boy had jumped off a low shelf, which had fallen along with him. The shelf had not hit the boy. But his mother slapped him because she was frightened—his father shouted that he couldn’t be a frog anymore—his sister was upset because she was the one who had to clean up his mess.
“Frogs die painful deaths,” his sister told him. “They’re run over and flattened by cars. Do you want to be squished?”
And the boy was never a frog again.
A few weeks passed without the boy calling his mother to ask for permission to do things. His father had stopped taking the boy out with him the last few Saturdays. His sister didn’t ask him any questions, like, “Why?” which he loved answering. When he came home from school, his older sister would just tell him to do his homework, and when his mother and father came home, he would mostly sit still, answering their questions about his day respectfully and politely, asking if he could brush his teeth, wash his face, go to bed. He lay down even though he wasn’t tired at all, and most of the time he could hear his mother’s accounts of work echoing through the walls until he fell asleep.
At the dinner table, he listened quietly as his mother told them about an infant. “This one-year-old kid, can you believe it, he fell down an entire flight of stairs. All the way down! But he survived! I asked if anyone caught him, but no one did. I asked, ‘Was there a plant or something soft to land on?’ But there wasn’t. A miracle!”
The next night when again, the boy found that he couldn’t sleep, he turned the light on and observed the stillness in his room. Nothing was moving except for the curtains. No sound could be heard except for his quiet heartbeat. He was starting to get drowsy when he saw a cockroach cross the floor. He had seen his mother do this: take a slipper to crush the cockroach. He had seen his father do this: roll up a newspaper to whack the cockroach. He had seen his sister do this: chase the cockroach with a soft broom to beat it. But the cockroach would never die.
The boy slept soundly that night.
The next morning, he called his mother at the hospital. “’Nay, I want to be a cockroach, please let me.”
“Ask your sister.” She put the phone down as a patient was dying beside her.
“Até, may I be a cockroach?”
“Why a cockroach?”
“Because they don’t die. They don’t get hurt.”
His sister did not smirk, smile, or laugh. She only shrugged. “Ask Tatay.”
The moment his father came home, he greeted him with, “’Tay, will you let me be a cockroach?”
“Yes, you’re a cockroach now.”
The boy jumped for joy.
And so, while his older sister was cooking, he crawled near her feet, and she started screaming. She chased him with a soft broom. He grew antennae. His eyes got bigger. His father was reading the paper, and the boy crawled across his neck, making him stamp his feet in angry surprise. The father rolled up his newspaper and tried to whack the boy, but the boy escaped quickly. He grew wings. He grew four more limbs. When his mother came home, he swooped at her from the corner of the ceiling, and she ducked and ran, wanting to cry for help. She hastily looked for a slipper and swung it about, but she couldn’t hit him. He was small now and he moved fast. His family didn’t have to worry anymore. He would never get hurt. He would never die.
All through dinner he hovered over his family, who were unable to eat in peace. His mother couldn’t talk about work as she kept looking up at the ceiling; his father and sister, likewise. Until sleep overtook them, their eyes were wide open, anticipating the boy’s every move. No one slept well for fear, and everyone was still yawning as they left the house the next morning.
The boy’s mother didn’t notice that he’d climbed into her purse. Before he had become a cockroach, he was never, ever permitted to go with her to the hospital. She said it wasn’t a place for children. But what about cockroaches? When he emerged from the purse, no one noticed him, as their gazes were at human eye-level. Everyone had business to attend to. Some were crying, some were close to dying, some were breathing their last. The boy suddenly felt an extreme sadness, and he wanted to go home and play, become a different animal, answer the question why.
But what was this? Shiny shoes almost crushed him, stretchers and wheelchairs almost wheeled over him, a broom almost swept him up, and something he’d never expected to fear—disinfectant almost jetted him! He hid in a corner, went into a hole, and, when he looked into the darkness, he saw a lot more of his kind.
He was a good cockroach, so he wanted to ask for permission. “Can I please be a boy again?”
But not one of them answered. They only gazed silently. He then remembered that he hadn’t eaten yet. The cockroach found his footing in the dark where he didn’t need eyes to see, until he exited through another hole, where the light blinded him. His feet quickly took him to the base of a dumpster where tens of thousands of cockroaches scuttled. And not only that: there were even rats, ants, flies, and other animals he had never become. Animals that he thought also wouldn’t die. He carefully climbed up the dumpster and went through a crack.
He had happened upon a feast. He walked on top of a piece of tissue paper filled with phlegm, some mango peel, bubblegum, a half-eaten piece of bread, a Styrofoam cup still containing coffee, a toothpick with a bit of food on it, until he arrived at a chicken bone to which bits of flesh still clung. Three cockroaches were already nibbling at it.
“May I please eat with you?” he asked them.
But none of them answered. He realized he no longer needed permission—and more than that, he no longer needed to be good. He took his first bite.
And he never was a boy again.
Carlo Paulo Pacolor lives in Quezon City, Philippines. They write fiction, drama, and essays. They are a gender non-conforming queer femme living with HIV. Recently, they have been directing and producing and making content for their own shows and whatchamacallits.
Soleil Davíd’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in MARY: A Journal of New Writing, Sinking City, Post No Ills, and The Margins, among others. Davíd was born and raised in the Philippines and received her BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley. A VONA/Voices alumna, she has received fellowships from PEN America, Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, and Indiana University, Bloomington, where she is currently an MFA candidate in poetry and the current poetry editor of Indiana Review.