It lived with them at Lismore, when Braid was a baby.

What else     was it known as?

                                         Light-headed with relief –

Braid here   beside him – Max hadn’t felt the urge to ask: what was it?

nor to explain he didn’t understand … classification’s jargon …

Why,

          he’d asked instead,

                                    was she called Braid?

Her face became unaccountably solemn.

Her mother’d had a long weekend

at Braidwood – way back in the late nineteen seventies –

it was after her Uni exams’d finished – the finals –

she’d majored in chemistry – & she’d gone there for a long weekend

with her boyfriend

just before she married Braid’s dad.

She’d liked the name, & the place, she’d said;

the boyfriend she loved had left her & she met Braid’s dad

who was older.  To think about whether she wanted to marry him,

she’d gone for a trip up north first, travelling alone to visit her family;

she’d acquired the Macropanesthia rhinoceros on the way back.

It had lived … Braid uttered thoughtfully … till she was almost seven.

A giant female rhinoceros cockroach.  It took

two & a half Arnott’s Milk Arrowroot biscuits

to balance evenly, matching weight with it    on the old apothecary’s metal scales

(once used, her mother said, with the tiny metal weights on one side,

to weigh some long-ago-chemist’s powders on the other) now in use

on the kitchen table.

Macropanesthia rhinoceros (Order: Blattodea) lived just outside their kitchen door

in the subterranean tunnels it made

in a large wooden box, nearly as tall as five-year-old Braid,

& only came up to the surface earth to bustle about when it rained.

Her dad made a fine-wire-mesh lid for the box,

to keep its inmate from predators

or escape. It took the rained-on leaf-mulch

from the surface down below, making trip after trip

to feed its children.

Putting his leg across hers to stop the récit

as he enters her Max wonders

why is she telling me this?