My big brother wears his orange Terminix shirt with “Barry” stitched in blue on the breast pocket. I don’t understand why he wants to make his living selling fumigation packages and supervising beefy crews pulling tents over roofs. I guess the money’s good. His life is based on the death of bugs and guaranteeing his odorless gases kill everything crawling, squirming, flying, scampering, and scuttling wall to wall and attic to basement. Fearing destruction, owners destroy armies of little things to cope.

Barry seems proud being a bug man. He stands tall in the kitchen of our old family home, where our father poured DDT into a moat-like ditch surrounding the house. Dadio claimed, before he died, I had a bug up my ass. I watch my brother gulp guava juice out of a carton. He knows where to find DDT and illegal canisters in Mexico. Sometimes the rich hire him to spill banned chemicals around their mansions to get added protection. “Adios, cucarachas,” Barry would joke. Funny how we protect ourselves from creatures sharing the earth. Poison enters the blood, seeps into organ and bone, burns through the skin of the planet.