Essay: Manifesto of a House Centipede

Deep in the dark corners of rickety Rogers Park homes, hallowed-out hallways, old-timey attics and bottomless basements of ancient apartments, I lurk in my forgotten empire — the unassuming crevices where ceilings meet floors.

In these sinister sanctuaries, I watch. I wonder. I wait. 

It’s my destiny to help centipede-kind win the war against our lifelong enemies — Loyola students. 

As a house centipede, my short lifespan may seem inconsequential. But I know better. For I know each battlefield is an opportunity to avenge my bug brethren, each Raid-ridden murder is reason for revenge. This is my reason for going on — why I continue to put one of my 15 pairs of legs in front of the others. 

This war wasn’t my species’ fault, but it has defined our lives and determined our fates for far too long. We entered Rogers Park homes in peace, offering our protective services as spider-eating arthropods, asking only for shelter inside the walls of Loyola students’ dwellings in return. 

When we made contact, we naively hoped this relationship would blossom into a prosperous, mutually-beneficial arrangement, in which centipedes and students could live together in harmony. 

How wrong we were. 

From the moment we set leg into the first string of student apartments, you students began murdering us, screaming in cacophonous bouts of high-pitched terror before smashing us with the nearest disposable object available. 

I remember that fateful event with visceral venom. Images of the fallen — or what’s left of them — on the sole of an unassuming Adidas Samba still churns my stomach and fills my mouth with bile, a solemn-tasting sourness which doesn’t even come close to the bitterness left by that tragic day. 

Since then, us house centipedes have tightened our ranks. Leg in leg in leg, we’ve heroically slipped through the cracks of student homes, fortifying our borders and boosting our numbers. 

Even as students have mercilessly invested in technologies to silence us — from pesticides to vacuums to sandals from Green Element Resale — we’ve grown stronger than their cruel and tortuous innovations. 

As their technological prowess rises, so too does our conviction. We’ll never be caught unaware again because now, at long last, we know our advantage — strength in numbers. While Loyola students may be bigger than we are, they’re terrified by our 30 legs, two eyes, 200 optical units and overwhelming quantity.

As long as these numbers keep reaching higher and higher, someday we’ll have enough legs, abdomens and comrades-in-antennae to cover the whole of your insidious campus — maybe someday all of Rogers Park.

And so as the war rages on, I’ll stay in the shadows, training the next generation day after day, season after season, mourning as my kind’s valiant efforts get literally crushed, literally, by last week’s issue of The Phoenix.

What I still don’t understand is why. Why do you Loyola students hate us so? We’re not poisonous, we can’t even bite — in fact, we get rid of the bugs who do. Are we really so grotesque that you Loyolans can’t see past our exoskeletons and into the merriment of our hearts?

Mark my words, the hour of reckoning is upon us. The day will come when Loyola students will walk into their apartments and find them thoroughly infested. On this day, us house centipedes will have finally made it home.