Free The Family Law by Benjamin Law

shadows. As I rinsed my tumbler, I wondered what the point of washing anything was, since everything would be covered in cockroach germs the next morning. No wonder my parents aren’t happy , I thought to myself. Whose parents could be happy in this house? I figured if the pest-control man wasn’t going to do his job properly, I’d have to take matters into my own hands.
    I’d read in the Australian Women’s Weekly about a surefire way to trap cockroaches. You got an empty ice-cream container, soaked stale bread in it with fat, sugar and alcohol, and greased the rim with oil. At night, you put the container in the corner of your kitchen and the cockroaches would climb in, driven crazy by the combination of sweetened liquor and grease. They’d try to get out, but the greased sides would keep them inside.
    The morning after I made the trap, my siblings and I, dressed in our school uniforms, approached it slowly. The first thing we noticed was a scratching noise from inside. Together, we peered into the container.
    â€˜Wow,’ one of us said. ‘That is so gross.’
    Inside was a stack of cockroaches, almost ten centimetres deep, crawling on top of each other. The cockroaches at the base were either dead or drunk, and the living ones were stepping on the bloated corpses of their comrades, trying to escape.
    Without saying a word, I carefully balanced the ice-cream container in my hands, while someone else opened the sliding door that led to the yard. In one swift motion, I threw the container up into the air, and it landed upside down on the ground. No one said a thing, but we all knew what to do. As the cockroaches scuttled away – big and small, fast and slow – into the corners of the garden, we screamed and started smashing them into the dirt with our school shoes, hollering like we were possessed. These things had ruined our home, they’d taken over our house, and now they were getting what had been coming to them. Finally, finally, finally, we had the motherfuckers cornered, something to destroy, something we had control over. We stomped and screamed while Mum watched on, bleary-eyed from another evening without sleep.
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    One of the first things my mother did after she separated from my father was to buy herself a new oven and dishwasher. The oven was fitted next to the cabinets without any gaps, and her new stovetop rested magically flat on the bench: no electric coils, just a polished ceramic top that lit red when in use. After the spaces between the bench and the dishwasher were sealed shut, the cockroaches disappeared almost overnight, taking their babies with them. With my father gone, the cockroaches evicted and new household appliances doing her work, my mother seemed to have a new lease on life. When I went to wash my glasses and mugs, she’d holler from the other room, ‘Don’t worry! I have a dishwasher now! You can use as many glasses as you like!’ Then she’d laugh like someone deranged, as though she could barely believe her luck.
    Years later, when I was eighteen, I had moved out of home and was living in an old Queenslander, a house that faced south, retained heat in summer and let in the freezing air in winter. In the damp, stormy summers, mushrooms would grow out of the shower fittings and fleas would make their way indoors, even though none of us ever let animals in. When the heat became excruciating, I’d lie in bed all evening with bowls of ice, moaning and nude. I thought I’d escaped them, but this new place was paradise for vermin and pestilence too. Still, I had a system for each species. The mosquitoes would be smoked out. The spiders would be let out gently. The fleas would be fumigated. And the cockroaches would be crushed without mercy, with no hesitation at all.

Tone Deaf
    When my dad sees an English word in the newspaper he doesn’t understand, he points to it and asks us for the definition. He’ll