Her life was squeezed out of her body, smashed between ruthless jaws.

Her last act as a loving mother was to give birth to her children, she couldn't see them, but the feeling of their tiny bodies slithering out of her abdomen relieved her. It had to be quick, 2 seconds later she was dead, the fate didn't give her the chance to say goodbye to the offspring she just left in this cruel world.

The children were left squirming together, the rests of her mother's carcass raining over them as the predator loomed near. He took a good look at them, counted his chances, and left without touching a single one.

---

Many years later, their bodies were no longer dragging through the dirt. They all had legs, they moved faster, and were capable of having their own offspring.

One dark night in the forest, two of them were roaming the forest, looking out for each other when one of them was no more. Fate has a funny sense of humor, so the poor cockroach encountered death in the maws of their mother's murderer.

The other one cowered, pained and startled as he were, he still knew he could outrun the beast, and that once aware of it's presence it meant no harm for him. So he let the grim sight of the beast gnawing over his brother flesh wash over him, waited for the coldness and sorrow to outgrow his fear, and then he spoke. "You monster, I know you don't remember me, but that's my brother right there, and we both were left orphan by you many years ago when you took our mother" - "I know silly, I know exactly who you are, I never forget a scent. Life is filled with delicious irony like this, I wouldn't miss this for the world".

The beast was still, it made no attempts to go after the other one. He felt reassured by this, so he kept on talking.

"If you were so cruel as to leave him an orphan and then eat him, you should've taken his life back then when we were just born" - "Oh... darling, I wouldn't dare. Some other may go on and on about how the experience of life is beautiful, it's better to live a few years even if your life is gonna end violently, much preferable than having no life at all. But that's not me, I couldn't care less about your feelings, I just knew your flesh would be worth more to me in a couple of years, so I preferred to let you grow older. Your species is a pest through this whole earth, your life has no special value, it's just like humans, there's so many of them that they can't really care about each other even at mayor catastrophes that take hundreds of their lives. Just look, creatures such as me have to eat, creatures such as you have to die in order for us to eat, that's just how it is."

After saying this, the lizard stepped forward, causing the cockroach to run backwards in sudden fear.

Such was the fate's will and wisdom that the cockroach stepped into a tarantula's lair, perhaps the lizard knew it was there, it certainly pleased it to see the bold cockroach being taken into the darkness.

Does really individual live really matter?