My family and I were flying back from Colorado. It was an evening flight, so the plane was dark inside, illuminated only by the soft running lights and occasional overhead reading lamp. My wife, Maria, and two kids were sitting in the three seats across the isle from me, Maria sitting in the seat closest to the isle. I was in the seat directly across the isle from her, with two strangers to my right, both engaged in a book.

As the plane made its ascent to cruising altitude, pitching upward, I noticed a large cockroach running down the center isle toward me and Maria. I’ve never seen a roach on a plane, especially one so huge. I didn't think such roaches existed, but maybe the Rockies bred some kind of mutant one.

Why would roaches want to fly (unless they're palmetto bugs!)? You need to know that Maria is absolutely terrified of roaches. She hates them worse than death. She goes berserk when she sees one. The rule in my house is I kill the roaches, Maria kills the spiders. Well, she doesn't kill them, she traps them and mercifully lets them go outside.

Back to the plane ... here comes that roach, ambling down the isle like it was out for its casual evening constitutional. But he was sort of stumbling like a drunkard. His gait wasn’t smooth and pretty. Probably half dead from the plane’s pesticide, I thought.

Maria was reading; she didn't notice it. But I knew that as it got closer, there'd be no way she could avoid seeing it, and if she were to see it, the plane would have undoubtedly crashed because she would have thrown herself out the side door. I couldn't let that happen. The roach was a good seven rows in front of me, but it proceeded toward us, undaunted. Why is nobody else seeing this, I wondered? The thing was a monster. It was coming straight for us. Five rows, four, three, two, one ... it was upon us. I had to act quickly. I lifted my left leg and brought my foot down on the thing with tremendous force, keeping my upper body stock still so as not to attract Maria's attention. It worked ... she never looked up from her book, nor did the strangers to my right.

Then I smelled it. It was a sweet, fruity fragrance ... actually pleasant. I lifted my foot and the roach had been reduced to nothing more than a glob of wet, splattered guts. I had really crushed it. But there was that odd smell again. What now, I thought? How am I going to get this cleaned up without Maria seeing it? Just knowing a roach was on the plane--even if it was dead--would have sent Maria into a frenzy. I tried to loosen the splattered glob from the carpet with my foot to see if I could shove it under a seat. As I did, I noticed the peculiar, pungent smell even more. I recalled somewhere from my childhood watching a nature show about exotic bugs emitting certain odors when attacked. Maybe that was it.

To get a closer look at the massacred mass on the carpet, I engaged the flashlight on my iPhone, aimed it at the glob and chuckled to myself. I had killed a massive red grape.