You Can Call Me Akfak

The Sisohpromatem

When Blatta Polyphagidae awoke from troubled dreams one morning, he found that he had been transformed on his trash into a tiny human. He began to choke. Desperately searching for the correct use of lungs, which were foreign objects to him. Normally Blatta could last without air for about thirty minutes, but he had a feeling that with these lungs he wouldn't last that long. Slowly, Blatta's choking turned to panting, and he got the hang of human breathing. The outside of the Welch's juice box in which he resided began to fluctuate in size with every confused breath Blatta took. Somewhat looking like a lung itself.

Blatta was a baby-boomer. All throughout his youth he and his friends salivated over the prospect of nuclear war. They had once seen on a paper that if humanity destroys itself with nuclear war, cockroaches would inherit the Earth. Blatta was an avid collector of newspaper clippings that mentioned nuclear war. He would collect them, display them, and then get hungry and eat his shrine of nuclear hope. This cycle repeated itself.

"What has happened to me?" Blatta wondered painfully. It was no dream. He thought he could go back to sleep and reawaken as a cockroach again but that was out of the question. And for some reason, sticky grape juice residue didn't feel very comfortable anymore, in fact, it was quite bothersome. Blatta became hungry, even starving. "But I just ate three days ago, how could i be hungry?"

Blatta crawled on all fours through the rip in the juice box. His tender skin was torn on the door and bright red blood ran down his side and onto his double mint doorstep. Blatta had never felt so uncomfortable. Hungry, sticky, and worse—leaking red juice. Blatta remembered where he had seen his favorite snack a year earlier.

He took an enormous bite into the back of the stamp, anticipating that it would end his hunger and satisfy his taste, as stamp glue had always done. Instead, it was disgusting and he promptly disposed of the stamp glue in his mouth and began to rain from his eyes. His thorax, or what he thought was his thorax, began to ache.

Feeling lonely, Blatta followed poop paths in search of his fellow cockroaches. By the time Blatta found another cockroach, his hands and knees were caked with cockroach crap. It was his sister that he found, and when she paused from inhaling banana peels, she looked up at Blatta, screamed, and scurried away as fast as her prothoracic, mesothoracic and metathoracic legs could carry her.