I couldn’t bear to look at it. Still, the first time Dea showed me the roach, I looked long enough to make note of its fat, distended body the color of shit; paper-thin wings which struggled to hoist that body into the air (and it did, pathetically, try); its spiked, wiry, little legs; and its antennae, long and spindly, in constant motion as it searched for an escape from its newly-imposed captivity. Dea had trapped it in a deli container, with holes poked into the top for airflow.

The day she caught it, Ted gave me a call.

“Your sister’s crazy,” he said to me over the phone. “She’s really outdone herself this time.” I agreed with him in spite of myself.

Given her condition, Ted and I had advised Dea to avoid cleaning and other forms of strenuous activity, just until her egg had been laid. Stubborn as always, Dea did as she liked and cleaned anyway, claiming it calmed her. We should have expected as much.

She had just started on the cupboard under the kitchen sink when she spotted the roach, perched motionless and docile right by the P-trap. It didn’t even put up a fight when Dea flipped the takeout container upside-down on top of it, maneuvered both bug and vessel out of the cupboard, stuck the lid on, and poked holes into the top of the makeshift cage using a sewing needle. She then fed the roach fresh breadcrumbs through the holes, placed it in her home studio, and waited for Ted to return from work.

Having grown up in New York and its characteristic filth, Dea and I were no stranger to cockroaches. Their flighty, repugnant nature, their inherent audacity, the way they scuttled into the gaps between wall and floor when the lights came on — we were intimately acquainted with it all. The roaches infiltrated the nooks and crannies of every cramped shoebox apartment we had the privilege of inhabiting, persevering in the face of any exterminator, insecticide, and glue trap we put in their path. Our childhood was an endless uphill battle with the things. Over time and seeing no alternative, we had begrudgingly come to coexist with them. The mere thought of a roach was enough to send a horrible surge of nausea through my body, but Dea had always been better with them than I was. She was insistent the one she’d captured was different, that it wasn’t as pesky as roaches tended to be.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that a weak roach was a dying roach, and it sounded like her new pet was at the end of its lifespan.

“You should’ve just sprayed it dead,” I told her. Then, remembering what took root within her abdomen, how that aerosol poison might affect her offspring, I added, “Or asked Ted to do it.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” Dea chided, her eyes milky, mind light-years away. “She was waiting for me.”

#

The days passed sluggishly and indolently amidst the warmth of summer. New York, resurrected from its wintertime hibernation and springtime tepidity, fell into full bloom once again, its citizens emerging fully metamorphosed from their cocoons and thirsty for nectar. As we approached the middle of the season, I thought the heat would have leeched Dea’s newest insanity out from within her.

It was a Saturday evening in June, a week or two after Dea had first shown me the roach, when I found myself near her and Ted’s Astoria apartment while running an errand. With some time to kill on hand, I called to ask if she’d come out for a coffee.

“I’m a little busy right now,” Dea muttered, her tone hushed. Even through the phone, I knew she was lying. “I think Teddy’s got a case of cabin fever, though. Can you take him out?”

Ted met me at a Yemeni coffee shop just off Ditmars Boulevard. He arrived wearing his go-to UDub hoodie and pajama bottoms, looking sleepy and unshaven. As we perused the menu, he marvelled at all the exotic drinks on offer. I ordered a pot of Adeni chai for us to share. When I paid for it, he didn’t insist otherwise.

Teapot in hand, we claimed a table by the window. Once seated, I looked out at the city, which in all its vigor, in all its self-insistent rhythm, vibrated with life beside us. I found myself suddenly overcome with a strange urge to run right onto 31st Street through the glass, to feel the thunk and clunk of my body against the window, the sheer force of my impact causing it to shatter into countless, tiny, shimmering crystals.

As swiftly as the urge came on, it disappeared. I shifted my attention back to Ted.

“She bought a cage for it,” he said, pouring out the chai, ensuring he filled his own cup first. I knew then that the roach — well and alive — had joined this party of two, that it might as well have pulled a chair up to our table and taken a seat beside us.

“Oh?”

“Put dirt at the bottom and everything,” Ted continued, “and a stick. Where did she even find a stick around here?”

“Astoria Park, probably. How is she?” I asked.

Ted shrugged. “In the thick of it.”

“It’ll pass,” I said.

“She thinks it’s pregnant,” Ted replied, taking a sip of his chai. He winced momentarily, probably thinking he hid it well. “’Cause it’s so fat.”

“Is it?” I asked. “Pregnant?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. All I know is if it lays eggs, I’m taking a flamethrower to the whole apartment.”

I didn’t think Ted could even operate a lighter, let alone a flamethrower, without accidentally committing arson. He was a lot like a drone in that sense: simple-minded, impulsive, and useless.

I was more than familiar with Dea’s usual escapist tendencies, her known proclivity for strange and short-lived hobbies. After four years of marriage, so was Ted. These parasites entered her randomly and unexpectedly. The best we could do was nurse her through it as she expelled them from her system.

Some were actually enjoyable for those of us in her orbit, like the time she’d developed a fascination toward Central Asian food (we had no Central Asian ancestry that I knew of, and I’d never seen her take an interest in the region before). Dea proclaimed she wanted to become more cultured, become a real woman of the world. Ted told Dea New York was the world, and that she was already a woman in it. He was still new to our ways then, and his naivete showed. Dea went ahead and purchased stacks of Central Asian cookbooks, insisting that she and I eat at an Uzbek restaurant in Rego Park each time we went out for a meal. I even accompanied her to a Central Asian grocery store near Brooklyn Beach once. That ended up being a good day. I think she enjoyed spending time with me, more than anything. We ate hot dogs and lemonade on Coney Island afterward, even as all of her frozen groceries melted in the heat.

When I pointed them out to her, Dea had replied aloofly, “Oh, those.” I knew then that she was on the comedown, making the gradual descent from her current passing frenzy to create space for the next.

It was in this way that my sister flitted from one eccentricity to another throughout her entire life, wearing various hats and sticking her fingers in all flavors of pie. There was, most notably, the (bad) poetry collection she wrote at seventeen, the birdwatching at twenty, the band she’d started at twenty-three, the Buddhism she began practicing in her late twenties and promptly abandoned at thirty, the crocheting at thirty-one, and most recently, LARPing.

I suppose, growing up amidst the circumstances we did and with a mother like ours, this was the only way Dea was able to keep herself sane and afloat. She was a woman perpetually on the run from her past and herself. This escapism had rendered Ted and me into unwitting spectators, perpetually waiting for Dea’s next trick. Fortunately for her, we loved her enough to sit through every song and dance, every pomp and circumstance, and every extravagant pageant she put on for show.

Hers was a strange psyche, and her pregnancy — now in its eighth month of inflicting ruin on her body — had done even stranger things to it.

“Did you guys have pet bugs growing up?” Ted asked.

I shook my head. “We didn’t have pets at all. Our mother hated animals.”

“Ah, was that cultural?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Because that would make sense,” Ted continued. “You know, if she wanted a pet spider, or a pet butterfly, I’d be like, whatever. Do whatever you want. Hell, I’d buy her one if she asked, you know, like I did the guitar? I never limited her. It’s not my style. You know that. But a cockroach? It’s just nasty. I—”

“Maybe she wants the cockroach eggs,” I said, “to hatch ’em.”

“What?”

“If it’s really pregnant,” I explained. “Build a little cockroach family.”

“Come on.”

“Imagine that, Teddy,” I goaded. “A whole nest of them.”

Ted looked uncomfortable. I felt as though I was standing in the doorway of a room he was trying to exit. His eyes refused to meet mine. I knew that sometimes, he didn’t know what to do with me. I was like a roach in the dark — best to pretend I wasn’t there.

#

Dea and I shared an angry mother. As children, it helped to think of Ma’s anger as an affliction. Something transient, like the common cold. That made it easier for us to forgive the woman, and feel virtuous about doing so. We spun all sorts of tales to cope with the convolutions of our lives. Only now, past the complex, sprawling stretch of our childhood, did I realize that there was never any ailment, only our mother’s hatred toward what she’d shaped into an existence, and the kind of deep-rooted anger that comes about from dreams unrealized.

Dea told me that was a real romantic way of looking at it.

For the most part, Ma raised us on her own. Dea and I had a father in the biological sense, though with the extent to which we saw him, we might as well have not had a father at all. He existed more so, in the long film of our lives, as a tertiary character, weaving in and out for holidays and other special occasions. Regardless, we cherished the little time we spent with him, his stocky presence serving as a welcome respite from the terrors inflicted on us at home. We loved our father in the way that most children do — instinctively and devotedly. If he knew how we suffered at the hands of Ma, he turned a blind eye to it. If he didn’t, we forgave him.

“He knew,” Dea said to me once. “He knew everything.”

Neither of us could pinpoint when the abuse started. We knew only that it did. Yet there must have been many firsts — the first time Ma forced us to eat expiring, near-rotten food or go to bed hungry; the first time she put out her cigarettes on our arms; the first time she struck us with such brute force that our skin split, beads of blood, ruby-red like pomegranate seeds, emerging from beneath the brownness of our sibling skin, our bodies surprising us with their combined endurance; and the first time she came to us in the aftermath, soft and apologetic, cleaning our wounds and nurturing us back to normalcy. She was a different woman in these later moments, the difference so stark it made us wonder if we’d imagined that other version of her, or if her one body had been cleaved into two souls.

Dea and I spent years bundled up in our mother’s web, blinded and inert, fodder for her daily feedings. We learned to be quiet, to slither into cracks and fissures, to become creatures of the night from the fear of being stomped out. While Ma’s eventual death had granted us our hard-earned freedom, the further away Dea and I travelled in time from the complexities of our childhood, the more difficult it became to remember the specifics, the sharpness of those unspeakable-yet-definitive moments, their beginnings and ends. If we were forgetting the larger cruelties, I knew for certain that there were smaller ones progressively being erased from our collective memory. Now, we mostly remembered the pain, the intensity of it, that suffocating realization that something horrible was happening to us. The memories themselves, when we weren’t careful, became hazy and muddled as we trudged on through the years of our lives.

“Isn’t it good,” Dea asked me once, “that we’re forgetting?”

“I’d rather remember,” I answered. It was the truth. “I don’t want to forget a thing.”

#

A few days after my meeting with Ted, Dea had me over for dinner at their apartment. I arrived an hour early, with a twenty-dollar bottle of rosé. Dea said anything cheaper was undrinkable and anything more expensive was extortionate. Once we’d exchanged our typical pleasantries, I headed to the living room, where Ted was sprawled out in front of the television. He was watching a YouTube video on surfing tricks.

“Teddy’s going down to Miami with some buds in about two weeks,” Dea explained, “for a bachelor party.”

“It’s gonna be sick,” added Ted.

“Your wife’s practically bursting at the seams,” I pointed out.

Dea grabbed my arm and pulled me toward her home studio, the second bedroom she’d repurposed for her artistic endeavors. Painting was the only hobby she hadn’t eventually abandoned. When they first moved in, she and Ted had planned for the room to be a joint home office. Gradually, Dea populated the space with so many supplies that Ted ended up ceding the entirety of it to her. Dea said he was real selfless for doing that, that it was a testament to how much he loved her. I told her he most likely couldn’t stomach the smell of her oil paints. Then she said I was a pessimist.

“Would it kill you to be nicer to Ted?” Dea asked once the door was shut.

“It would,” I said.

“He really tries with you, you know.”

Ignoring her, I asked, “How’s your pet?”

Dea grinned. “Go take a look,” she said, pointing to the cage in the corner of the room.

I walked over. It was exactly as Ted had described: a plastic cage with a purple lid (and a hatch at the top to put food in), its base covered with substrate, and a stick right in the center of it. I noticed food scraps scattered across the bottom — a shrivelled-up apple peel, some fragments of bread. Peering closer, I tried to spot the roach. I was a little fearful, and ashamed at feeling so. I didn’t want the thing to jump out at me.

After a couple more torturous seconds, I found the roach, huddled at a corner of the cage. It was still and sedentary, as though it had resigned itself to Dea’s well-meaning captivity. I thought to myself, feeling a jolt of pity alongside my general disgust, that it was a very feeble roach. That it must have been very weak to have been plucked from its free life, put into a stifling little enclosure, and now forced to live in its own piss and shit.

The cage had an odd smell emanating from it — earthy and slightly funky. “Ugh,” I said.

“Look closer,” Dea urged.

Confused as to what I could have missed in a cage this small, I focused my eyes on the substrate, honing in on its coarseness. At first I couldn’t see anything. Or maybe I didn’t want to see. Then, sensing Dea’s insistence, feeling the tangibility of it standing right behind me, I compelled myself to keep looking.

At last, I saw it: movement where there shouldn’t have been any. Its offspring, of course. Cockroach nymphs, what seemed like hundreds of the things, scurried around the cage, running to and fro around their mother. They were so small that I’d missed them in my initial examination. A shudder travelled up my spine.

“She gave birth a week after I caught her,” Dea said. The glee in her tone worried me. “She was full of eggs.”

I turned away from the cage. “Gross.”

Dea shot me a look full of disappointment. “I think I’m gonna name her.”

“Watcha thinking?”

“Franny.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Like Franz. Kafka, you know.”

“That’s on the nose.”

“I mean, I guess.”

“Dea,” I said, “this is really disgusting.”

“No, it’s not,” she scoffed, crossing her arms over her chest.

“It is.”

“You don’t have to say things like that.”

“Things like what?”

“You know what.”

I couldn’t seem to get through to Dea. I was acutely aware I was losing her, and if it were to something greater than me, I might have allowed it. But it was only the roach, postpartum and pitiful, halfway-toward-death in its filthy cage.

“Is everything okay? Are you and Ted—”

“We’re fine!” Dea exclaimed.

“It doesn’t sound like—”

“Everything’s fine!”

“Are you sure? Is it the pregnancy?”

“Yes. And no.”

“I—”

“You always do this, you know.”

“Do what?” I asked.

“You think I’ve got some pathology that needs fixing, like I don’t know what’s good for me, like you need to mother me or whatever.” She stopped for air, then continued, “Well, newsflash, I don’t need your bullshit therapy, or concern, or whatever it is you’re offering. I know you think I’m crazy, that—”

“You are crazy,” I said. “This is crazy.”

“Don’t call me crazy.”

“You’re about to be a mother, and all Ted and I do is babysit you.”

Dea frowned. “Babysit? Is that what you think I am? A child?”

“You said it,” I replied, “not me.”

I had stepped past the line in the sand. Dea shut down, leaving us in uncomfortable silence.

“Let’s eat,” she offered at last, breaking the quietness herself. “Ted made Stroganoff.”

I wasn’t able to cut through the palpable tension in the air during dinner, nor the beef on my plate, which was rubbery, tough, and undersalted. I knew Dea was annoyed at me, and had likely retreated into that inner world of hers, one which accepted no visitors. I wouldn’t get through to her, not this evening.

If Ted was aware of what hung in the air, he was too busy shoveling mashed potatoes into his mouth to give us any indication of it. Either that, or he was allowing us grace. For all his faults, he did that well.

“How’s the Stroganoff?” he asked between mouthfuls.

“Yeah, really good, Teddy,” said Dea absentmindedly.

“Really good,” I parroted, looking down at my plate.

Ted chuckled. “I surprise myself sometimes.”

#

After I left her apartment that evening, Dea refused to respond to any of my calls or texts. Days passed. I spent them in a sort of amphibian limbo, consisting of moments where I drowned in the uncertainty, others in which I was wholly weightless and airborne.

Wanting a resolution, I called Ted. He picked up after two rings.

“Yello.”

“Hey Ted,” I said, playing nice, “how’s it going?”

“Not bad,” he said. “I’m leaving for Miami the day after tomorrow.”

“Nice. You excited?”

“Yeah,” Ted replied, “guess you could say that.”

“Cool.”

“I’ll be back two weeks before her due date.”

“Good to know,” I said. “How is— How’s Dea?”

Ted let out a sigh. “You really hurt her, kid. You know the pregnancy’s got her in a weird place.”

I remained silent, resenting the admonishment.

“Look,” Ted continued. “She’ll get in touch when she’s ready. If anything happens to her or the baby while I’m gone, she knows who to call.”

“Okay.”

“You’ve been through worse. Just give her some time.”

“Thanks, Ted,” I said.

“Of course,” he said before hanging up.

Dea had met Ted at a neighborhood run club, two years after our mother’s death. He ran at a medium pace like her, had just moved to the city from Seattle, and came from the sort of WASPy family that provided New York with its constant supply of transplants and tryhards.

“He’s a real salt-of-the-earth American,” Dea had said, “with Pacific Northwest charm.”

“What does he want with you?” I asked in return.

I hated the man instantly. More importantly, I distrusted him. He was too happy to be in New York, floating through the city like it was a diorama inside a snowglobe, his joviality inappropriate and entirely misplaced. He seemed to me like an intruder in the carefully-constructed microclimate my sister and I had spent our lives perfecting. A foreign body requiring immediate removal.

Dea quit that run club after four months, but she didn’t quit Ted. Five years later, they married. I didn’t fully understand their union, and by no means was I fond of Ted. But over time I had come to tolerate him, and for Dea’s sake he and I coexisted in one step below harmony. As far as safety nets went, she could’ve chosen worse.

Once, I admitted to her, “I don’t like Ted.”

“No,” she agreed. “Worse. I think you love him.”

The wedding had been an intimate ceremony, the guest list consisting mostly of the couple’s close friends and Ted’s pyramid scheme of a family. Dea didn’t invite our father. I felt awkward and pensive throughout the entire ordeal. It seemed to me like I’d lost a limb, or a tail, the way lizards did. Only mine would never regrow.

Ted caught me taking a smoke break at the back of the reception venue. He didn’t know I smoked.

“Only when I’m stressed,” I explained.

“Huh.”

“I’m happy for you, Ted. I hope you two have the life of your dreams,” I said. I didn’t mean it. Or it’s possible I did, in a defeated, obligatory way. He had won our years-long cold war.

“Let me bum a cig,” he said.

I handed Ted a cigarette from my secret pack of Marlboro Reds and lit it for him. He took a long, exaggerated drag, and blew the smoke directly into my face.

“Every version of her dream life has you in it.”

#

I sensed the call in the air before it reached my phone, as though Dea were communicating with me through echolocation. It was a little past three in the morning, nearly a week after I had spoken to Ted. I took a moment to watch the phone ring before I picked up, feeling its vibrations travel through my bed as its light brightened up my bedroom. Then, I answered.

“Hello?” I croaked.

“My water broke. It’s coming,” Dea said. “I’m at Mount Sinai.”

“I’ll be right there,” I said.

I zoomed across the city to find Dea inside her assigned labor and delivery suite at the hospital, snacking on an ice pop while staring mindlessly out the window. When she saw me enter, all sweaty and breathless from the panic surging through my system, she grinned and reached her arms out for a hug.

We exchanged in the gesture that which we couldn’t verbally. Save for the swell of her belly, she felt fragile in my arms, as frail as a hummingbird. I loosened my hold on her.

“You came!” she exclaimed.

“Why wouldn’t I?” I asked, frowning. “Of course I did. How did you get here? Did you drive yourself?”

“Doctor says it’s gonna be a few hours,” Dea said, ignoring my questions. The ice pop had turned her tongue blue.

“I’m here. I’ll wait with you.” I looked around the room. “Did you call Ted?”

“Yeah,” said Dea. “He’s taking the first flight out of Miami.”

“Nice of him,” I said.

A shudder passed through her. It looked like a current of electricity had travelled from the bottom of her feet to the top of her head. I watched as she tried — unsuccessfully — to hide a grimace. I wished she wouldn’t.

“Contraction?” I asked.

“Yeah,” replied Dea, clutching her stomach. She put her ice pop back in its wrapper. It was going to melt. “Lie down next to me, won’t you?”

I crawled into the bed next to her. Once on my back, I looked up at the white, sterile ceiling, breathing in the antiseptic odor universal to hospitals.

“Franny died,” Dea said, letting out a long, heavy sigh.

“Oh,” I said, turning my head to glance at her. “I’m so sorry.”

“You’re not, but that’s okay,” she replied. She chuckled softly. “The whole thing was kind of ridiculous anyways. Keeping a cockroach as a pet and all.”

I said nothing, though I was secretly relieved she had come to her senses. Dea turned to reach into the duffel bag she’d brought with her and searched around for a moment, finally pulling out a folded-up Ziploc sandwich bag. She handed it to me, eyes wide open and expectant.

“What’s this?” I asked, taking the bag from her. Slowly, I unfolded it. “Oh, Dea, God!”

I should have known. It was the roach, dead and dried up. Though it was only its carcass, I couldn’t help but feel a wave of revulsion looking at the thing, thinking it might spring back to life at any second. Frantically, I handed the bag back to Dea.

“I made Ted throw the cage away,” said Dea, taking the bag from me. “The little ones were getting bigger. It was making me nervous.”

“Good.”

“Will you—” she started. “Will you give Franny a send-off with me?”

Unsure as to how Dea intended to send off a dead roach in the middle of a hospital room, but sensing that the formality of it was important to her, I replied, “Sure.”

Roach in hand, Dea rose from the bed and hobbled toward the attached bathroom. I followed. Once the both of us were inside, she gently closed the door and walked toward the toilet. She lifted the lid, opened up the Ziploc bag that held Franny, and — rather unceremoniously — dumped the roach into the water.

“Will you do the honors?” Dea asked.

I nodded, reaching for the flush. Then, I stopped to ask, “Do you— Do you want to say a few words? For Franny?”

“No,” said Dea. Her voice betrayed nothing. “She was such a small thing, really.”

In the end, Ted’s wings couldn’t fly him to New York in time. When the moment eventually arrived for Dea to tear open, to push out what had been ripening inside her for nine months, she battled gloriously, heaving to eject her sacred progeny, the continuation of our species within this strange and wonderful ecosystem. Wholly transfixed, I remained right by my sister’s side throughout it all. I couldn’t bear to look away.