‘I am alert to small moving things, and spin around toward a floating dust mote. I am alert to darker spots against a lighter background, but these are only the roses on my pillowcase… The stillness of death. When the small creature does not move away from the lowering hand… In the cardboard trap, five or six of them are stuck-frozen at odd angles, alive with an uncanny stillness, in this box like a child’s miniature theatre… The white autumn light in the afternoon. They sleep behind a child’s drawings on the kitchen wall. I tap each piece of paper and they burst out from the edges of pictures that are already filled with shooting stars, missiles, machine guns, land mines…’

Excerpt from Cockroaches in Autumn – Lydia Davis