Silverfish
Ryan Dilbert

“What do you want?” This is how my roommate, Iris, usually answers the phone.

“There’s a silverfish in the apartment,” I tell her.

“Well, kill it,” she says.

She sounds annoyed. The thing is, the silverfish is bigger than an Escalade. It swallows the toilet, viscous spittle dripping onto the floor.

I explain gingerly that it ate Iris’s cat. She’s pissed. Somehow she manages to blame this shit on me. She rushes home and we take turns stabbing the thing with a piece of broken PVC pipe. It roars, its jaws snapping near our shoulders. It bites off half my foot and I give it the finger.

Eventually, Iris coaxes the demonic insect into the kitchen and sets it on fire with the gas stove. We put iTunes on shuffle as we bag up the burnt chunks of his hideous flesh and both sing along to “Dirt Off Your Shoulder.”

If you feelin like a pimp nigga
go and brush your shoulders off
Ladies is pimps too
go and brush your shoulders off.

We laugh as we struggle Stooges-style with the unwieldy garbage bags full of dead silverfish. Iris bandages up my foot and I fall asleep in her desk chair.

It doesn’t take long for things to go back to the way they were.

Return to Archive