Looking through my (digital) collection of stories, story ideas and fragments, I found something called ROACH, probably a scrap I wrote when I had my Atari ST (circa 1987-90) that was later converted to a DOS text format. In any case, dragging it into the latest version of Word provided me with this:
The Boogum in the Closet
I was getting ready for class, much as I do on the other four days of the week. It was a Tuesday, perfectly normal. I had already brushed my teeth, washed my hair, inspected by body for small, potentially cancerous tumours and was now opening the closet to get my jacket. As I said, all perfectly normal.
For the last two years I had gone through this same routine. Not a single detail had changed. I’m not much of a morning person, liable to sleep in till noon if you let me. I had devised this nearly sacred morning ritual to keep me awake, to allow my mind the time it needed to realize that my body was staying up and it had better come around, too.
As nearly sacred rituals go, I had followed this one with appropriate religious zeal. The only thing that had changed was the specific location. Being the quintessential starving college student, I was forced to move from abode to abode, constantly seeking the cheapest rent and the lowest number of cockroaches. The optimal balance was ever-elusive. It seemed to exist in my current apartment, though.
Of course, I had only lived in it for a little over twenty-four hours. Give the little nippers time.
I opened the closet and observed, with disgust,
And yes, it ends with the comma after “disgust”. It’s like I ended it there just to jerk around anyone coming across it years later — including myself because I have no freaking clue what was in that closet. Proof that writers are weird. All of them.