The Time I Committed (Intentionally) Negligent Homicide

This is a story about pot. And a roach. And definitely not in the way you’re thinking. 

My high school best friend and I once caught a cottonmouth snake (and put it in a metal box) with nothing but a broom and teenage gumption. My dad made that clear how fantastically stupid that was when he dumped the box out and dramatically shot the snake in the head. But, you may be aware, teenagers are fantastically stupid (and mostly fearless) creatures. Lindsey was definitely (mostly) fearless. There was really only one thing that she was truly scared of-cockroaches. 

Lindsey lived a largely cockroachless existence in a relatively suburban neighborhood.  At my house in the country; however; she was much more likely to run afoul of her dreaded enemy. To be clear, my family isn’t gross. We don’t leave food out and my mom (or someone she’d hired) was always perpetually cleaning the house. Roaches are just a given if you live in the country…especially if your property used to be a “cut your own Christmas tree” farm. Roaches are just part of that life and it was understood that if there was a roach afoot while Lindsey was over, I was to dispense with it immediately and without hesitation. 

My backyard legit looked like this

One evening, we were in my bedroom and my friend spotted one on my nightstand. I attempted to hit it with a flip flop, but since it was balanced precariously on the side of a book, I was unsuccessful in my attempt to squish it. I had simply made it run faster and onto the floor. I attempted again to send it into the long night by hitting it with the flip flop while it was scurrying across the floor. Well, we had carpet and that was a problem. In order to squish the roach hard enough to kill it on the fluffy carpet, I would have almost certainly had to apply enough pressure to also send its guts into the carpet fibers. 

I did not think my obsessively clean mom would appreciate having bug guts pounded into her carpet, so I had to think fast and come up with a more creative solution…all while the roach was trying to escape its impending death at my hand. 

I did a quick scan of my room and found an empty terra cotta pot that I had not yet made into the decoration for which it was intended. I grabbed the pot, chased the roach into the hallway and set the pot down over the roach-trapping, but not killing it. This was a pot intended for an outdoor plant, so there was a large drain hole in the bottom, out of which the roach could likely escape. I grabbed an old copy of Seventeen magazine I had lying around (yes, kids, I used to subscribe to actual magazines made out of *gasp* paper) and placed it on top of the hole. 

Pots? Nah, son. Roach prisons.

Once the roach was handily trapped in its makeshift prison I promptly…forgot all about it. One of the strange and interesting things about ADHD is that once an object is in a place for a certain period of time, the brain ceased to register it almost entirely. So despite the fact that I had to step around the roach jail each time I left or entered my room, I didn’t really see it. 

The following day, my dad asks, “Why is there a pot in the hall?”

Me, “There’s a roach in it.”

Dad, “Oh. Ok... What’s your plan? Starve it to death?”

The assumption that I ever got as far as having a plan was quite frankly, laughable. 

Me, “I don’t know. I guess…”

My dad suffers from the same type of neurodivergence that I do, so the pot-roach was immediately forgotten about. Or perhaps my dad just didn’t feel like dealing with my special brand of nonsense that day, I can’t be 100% certain. 

The room I occupied in my parents’ home was at the end of a long hallway. My OCD mom found it far easier to just ignore that end of the house than come face to face with my slovenliness. So it was a few more days before she posed the question, “Why is there a pot in the hall?”

Me, “I don’t know.”

To this day, I cannot tell you what possessed me to tell my dad the truth immediately with 0 hesitation and to outright lie to my mom about the same thing 3 days later. 

The closest I can reasonably come to an explanation is that I always felt my dad fundamentally understood most of my stranger behaviors (or if he didn’t, certainly questioned them less often) while my mom was confounded by them. 

My mom takes a beat to process my denial and then asks, “Is there a roach in that pot?”

 “Maybe.”

Mom, “Get rid of the pot roach. It’s probably dead by now.”

It was. An autopsy on an animal is called a necropsy, so did I really commit homicide? Necrocide? <-- that has a squiggly red line under it, so I'm assuming that's not a thing.