Shoebag Read Online Free

breath.
    Suddenly there was a familiar sight on the big 25 inch screen. Cockroaches. Dozens of them running around a giant chunk of Swiss cheese.
    Shoebag felt a thrill of recognition. Here were his own kind on television! If there were cockroaches featured on prime time on national TV, they could not be as hated as his family had always claimed.
    Shoebag felt proud, and he looked across at Pretty Soft to see her reaction.
    “… twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one,” she was counting as she combed her hair, and although her eyes were on the screen, Shoebag could tell nothing about her feelings.
    He was planning to exclaim on cockroach bravery (risking exposure and eye glare under those bright television lights) and their great beauty (they had chosen only the ones with the shiniest shells and the longest antennae). But something catastrophic happened before Shoebag could speak.
    A great white cloud was puffed at the cockroaches causing them to fall over, legs up, as it mushroomed over their little bodies and hung above them.
    An announcer’s voice with a particularly ominous tone, said “Zap zaps cockroaches dead!”
    “Oh, no,” said Shoebag. “Zap!”
    “It’s awfully smelly stuff, isn’t it?” Pretty Soft commented. “On the first Monday of every month, when they fumigate here, I go to the park with Madam G. de la G. Then mother sprays the house with Fresh Meadow Scent, so there’s no foul odors left when I get back.”
    There was not one survivor on the TV screen … and now a large hand with wrist hairs was holding up a can of Zap.
    “Zap!” said the announcer’s voice. “For things that don’t deserve to live!”
    Shoebag said, “Why don’t they?”
    The announcer couldn’t answer Shoebag, of course, but Pretty Soft did as she ran the pink hairbrush through the left side of her long blonde hair “… sixty … sixty-one, sixty-two … because they’re ugly little insects,” she said. “And they’re filthy!”
    “They’ve been around for 250 million years,” Shoebag said. “They were here 249 million years before you were!”
    “I don’t care what was here before I was,” said Pretty Soft.
    “They don’t harm people.”
    “They hide out in drainboards, under toasters, anywhere they feel like it, in people’s homes.”
    “They were here first!” Shoebag said. “People moved into their homes.”
    “But cockroaches don’t have leases,” said Pretty Soft. “People have leases. We have a three-year lease on this apartment, and we’ll probably renew it.”
    “A lease is just a piece of paper!” said Shoebag.
    “But if you don’t have one,” Pretty Soft said, “you can’t live in an apartment … unless of course you buy the building. I very much doubt that cockroaches make any money.”
    “Is money all you care about?” Shoebag asked. He was still badly shaken by the sight of his own species flat on their backs, feet-up, dead.
    “I care about being beautiful first,” said Pretty Soft, “because if I wasn’t beautiful I wouldn’t have so much money.”
    “Aren’t there other ways to make money?” Shoebag asked.
    “Not when you’re only seven years old,” Pretty Soft said. “Wherever you came from, you have forgotten how hard life really is sometimes.”
    No, Shoebag had not forgotten that at all, but he was surprised to hear Pretty Soft say such a thing.
    “You think life is hard?” he asked her.
    “I protect myself against it all the time,” she told him. “I shouldn’t even be having this conversation, for example.”
    “Why not?” Shoebag asked.
    “Because I have already lost count of my brushstrokes,” Pretty Soft said. “I have already broken my routine. It’s not good to break your routine, not when it interferes with the business at hand.”
    With that, she began all over again on the left side of her head, counting, “One, two, three …”
    Shoebag turned his attention back to the sitcom, but not before saying The Cockroach Prayer for the