The Unmade Bed

Lance opened the door to his filthy, one bedroom, one bathroom apartment.  In the living room sat a big screen TV, various DVD’s sprawled across the floor; some in cases, most not; two black leather sofas, and a cheap black and white thrift store coffee table.  He tossed his keys onto the coffee table and made his way through the mess to the bedroom, which looked even worse than the living room.

        Lance took his brown coat off and threw it to the floor.  He was aiming for the large pile of clothes, but it landed closer to the half eaten week old pizza.  There were crumpled pieces of paper, soda cans, beer cans, and random household objects lying on the floor.  It took him almost and extra half hour to get ready for work each morning, simply because he could never find anything. 

        The cockroach that was crawling on the wall before lance left that morning was now feasting upon the pizza on the floor.  He was going to kill the bug when he first noticed it while getting ready for work earlier that day.  However, he changed his mind when he though about the woman who ruined his life. 

        She hated cockroaches.  She thought of them as demons sent to the earth by Satan himself.  They were the cursed souls of humans that were now shunned from the beautiful kingdom and forced to wander hell (earth) for all eternity with absolutely no purpose, and no way to die other than being squished…even then, they would simply be reincarnated into another cockroach.  Every day, she would clean the house so thoroughly just to avoid them.  She made the bed every morning just in case one happened to be crawling around in the bed.  That way he wouldn’t be able to hide in the wrinkled white sheets. 

        So that morning, lance did not make his bed, nor did he throw away the week old pizza on the floor.  Instead he left everything just as filthy and messy as it had been for days, named the cockroach Eduardo, and kept him around, just to spite her.