It all started when I decided to set up the coffee pot so it was ready in the morning and I would just have to push the button. It was around 8:45pm and I had just scooped some Medaglia D'Oro (yes I put espresso in my coffee pot) and I was reaching under the cabinet to take out a disposable coffee cup. That's when I felt it.

Something brushed my left foot. It felt small and sort of rigid - perhaps like an old piece of pasta that didn't make it to the garbage and had solidified under the sink. I closely examined the gray tile of the kitchen floor looking for the offensive piece of rotting trash.

"Oh shit!", I screamed and jumped upward like a bullfrog when I realized that it had not been a piece of rotini but it was, in fact, a cricket. I grabbed the nearest object that could be used as a weapon - my broom - and tried beating the crap out of it. It disappeared.

Great. I'm supposed to sleep with this thing flinging itself around my apartment? And so the search began... I gingerly crept from room to room hoping the cricket would not jump out from behind a piece of furniture and hit me in the face. He wasn't in the bathroom (I guess he went before he left the house) and he didn't appear to be in the living room, either.

So I decided he must have hopped all the way through my apartment and was now lurking in my bedroom waiting to attack me. I should also mention that at this point I had decided that the cricket was a "he" because it had aggressively forced its way into the apartment of a single, 27-year-old woman who lives by herself and seemed to be there for only one reason - domination through fear.

I figured the floor was the most logical place to start looking. My bedroom carpet is the color of beach sand, flecked with little dark accents so it would be difficult to see the little guy. I got on my hands and knees and crawled slowly around the room searching under the bed, dresser, chair and vanity - all the time certain I could hear a faint chirping coming from somewhere.

The closet! 'That asshole better not be anywhere near my shoes', I thought as I dashed over to the door and put my ear to it. Nothing. The chirping was coming from outside.

So I decided to return to the scene of the crime. Like any good detective, I would begin by collecting evidence and work from there. This time, as I stared at the kitchen floor, I noticed something that had eluded me before...

A leg! He surely could not have gotten very far with such a profound injury as a missing appendage. Perhaps I had even killed him and didn't know it. That was it. He must have slumped off somewhere in the kitchen to die after I beat him up with the broom.

So I pulled out the chairs and table searching for the cricket carcass. But he wasn't there. Nor was he under the stove, fridge or cabinets. I began to get the sneaky suspiscion that my intruder was somewhere gasping, choking, clutching his cricket chest still pathetically clinging to life.

Clinging! The broom! It was lying on the floor right where I threw it after the perpetrator had disappeared. I picked it up and held it at arm's length in front of me and slowly began to bang it into the cabinet underneath the coffee pot - the exact spot where the fiasco had begun. Still now showing of my assailant.

So then I did something very, very brave. I peeked around for a close look at the head of the broom. But all I found was dust. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted him on the floor. Just laying there mocking me in my futile efforts to exterminate him. He must have fallen out during all the banging.

I waited a minute to see if he would move. He didn't. The two of us tested each other with each second that passed on the digital microwave clock...seeing who would make the first move. I was finally the one to break down. I nudged him with a bristle of the broom. He appeared to be catatonic. So I knelt down and was about to grab his remaining hind leg between my thumb and forefinger when -

TWITCH! Antenna movement! Flailing legs! He was still alive. But now I felt bad for him. The poor little guy. He had lost all his motility when his hind leg was savagely ripped off by my broom attack. I had to end his suffering. There was no other choice.

So I did what any girl would do. I took my brand new Cache catalog off the kitchen table and I placed it gently over him. I bid him a sweet farewell. Then I gracefully stepped onto it in a lovely looking arabesque, feeling the dainty crunch of his exoskeleton under the ball of my foot. I let out a little squeal so I didn't have to hear it.

Then, just to ensure that he was absolutely, 100% dead, I took a Dean Koontz novel - The Face, to be exact - grasped it firmly like a brick in my hand and slammed it five times into the face of the model on the front of the Cache catalog.

Minutes later, as I was wiping up his remains with a paper towel, I paused for a moment of silence and respect and listened to the crickets outside chirping a little requiem for my intruder. I admit I felt a little sad...

This morning, after stepping out of the shower and into my hallway, I stopped dead in my tracks. Another one. I don't know if it was the first cricket's mother, buddy, pimp, whatever. But I knew then, as I slowly reached for the Cache catalog, that I may have made a huge mistake...