THEY CRAWL AMONG
US: A BROOKLYN SURVIVAL SAGA
Three Tales of Terror, and Questionable Life Choices
PART I — The Bathtub Olympics:
When I was five, we moved to an apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn on 95th Street and 4th Avenue — prime real estate if you enjoy the soothing rumble of the RR subway line and the occasional prehistoric water bug paying rent‑free visits.
Summertime meant one thing: humidity, open windows, fans and water bugs the size of toddlers taking the express train straight into our building. Every now and then, one would wander into our apartment like it was checking on its mail after vacation.
One night, my sister was babysitting me while my parents were out. She went into the bathroom and saw a water bug that had risen from the bathtub drain like it was making a dramatic entrance on Broadway.
She screamed. I screamed. The bug probably screamed internally.
What does my teenage sister decide to do?
Drown it.
A water bug.
She turns on the faucet full blast, yelling for me to grab the broom, like it was the standard‑issue Brooklyn home‑defense equipment. I sprint, hand her the broom, and she starts holding this huge bug underwater like she’s baptizing it against its will.
Every time she thought it was dead, she’d lift the broom — and that sucker would swim like it was training for the Olympics. Freestyle. Backstroke. Butterfly. It had better form than half the Olympic swim team.
I don’t remember how she finally killed it, but knowing my sister, she probably grabbed a shoe and handled it Brooklyn‑style, like a Mother that heard her kid curse for the first time.
When my parents came home, she told them the whole
traumatic saga. My father laughed. She snapped, “It’s not funny!”
He just looked at her and said:
“Linda… they’re called water bugs. Why do you think that is?”
She stared at him, processing the betrayal of biology.
“Oh. Yeah.”
What more could she say.
PART II — The Scream
Fast‑forward to age 23. I rented a “basement” apartment — which, in Brooklyn, is code for “you will meet creatures evolution forgot.”
The water bugs in this apartment weren’t normal. They were the size of cabs. They came from a creepy unfinished space where the pipes lived, behind a hollow‑core door that absolutely should’ve had a warning label.
I only saw two of these monsters in the year I lived there. One my boyfriend killed. The other… well.
I was doing dishes, minding my business, when my dog made a weird noise behind me. I turned to look at him — and when I turned back, a water bug was sitting eight inches from my face on the cabinet next to the sink, like it was waiting for me to finish rinsing the plate.
I let out a scream so sharp, so loud, so primal, that the bug literally fell off the cabinet and died on the spot!
I don’t know if I:
Shocked it to death
Ruptured its internal organs with soundwaves
Or if it simply said, “You know what? I’m done.”
But it was dead.
Dead as a doornail.
Killed by the power of my vocal cords.
Whitney Houston would have been proud.
PART III — The Babies
I went to my boyfriend’s mother’s apartment to pick up soup she made for us. She told me to grab one of her saved 3‑lb. butter tubs from the cabinet — because in Brooklyn, every household has a stack of those tubs that have lived a lifetime.
I ladled the soup, while chatting with her, went home, and heated some up because I was starving.
It was delicious. Vegetables, noodles, chicken, herbs…
Except the herbs looked a little strange.
I grabbed a magnifying glass — because apparently, I was Sherlock Holmes that day and what I saw would haunt me forever.
Floating in my soup were:
Teeny‑weenie baby cockroaches
Legs sprawled
Antennae...
Tiny corpses, because they heard water bugs don’t drown so they said:
“Watch this — hold my beer.”
But the reality set in… I had ingested many baby roaches! My bowl was nearly empty!
I ran to the bathroom and puked like I was auditioning for an exorcism movie. Then I bagged the container, tied it like radioactive waste, and marched it outside to the trash cans.
Brooklyn had betrayed me.
THE TAKEAWAY:
Some things can’t be drowned.
Some things can be screamed dead.
And some things need to be looked at before it’s ladled into a butter tub.
|
Bug Meteor Score |
|
Category Score
Notes |
|
Linda’s Survival
Instincts 4/10 Attempted to drown a bug literally
designed for water. |
|
Water Bug Athleticism 9/10 Olympic‑level swimming, questionable morals. |
|
My Scream Power 10/10 A scream capable of killing! I received
an offer by the CIA. |
|
Basement Apt.
Horror 8/10 One
hollow‑core
door away from the Discovery Channel |
|
Soup Trauma 11/10 Exceeded
legal limits for emotional damage. |
|
Dad’s Brooklyn Logic 10/10 Delivered the perfect one‑liner with zero
sympathy. |
|
Overall Brooklyn
Chaos 8/10 A
trilogy of terror only a true New Yorker survives. |
the roaches were protein !!!
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