I pray my painting pleases our Maker.” Abraham smiled to watch his cockroach companions scurry along the oval racetrack he traced upon his chamber’s floor that morning with sugar water. He had painted all of the bugs’ shells in his patterns of stars, sunbursts and swirls, and those carapaces glimmered in his underground chamber’s dim lighting. With each bug sporting a different color and pattern scheme, Abraham soon chose favorites from his contestants. The cockroach whose shell he had painted blue and dotted with silver moons was the quickest of the bunch, but that bug seemed incapable of following the trail long enough to maintain any lead earned by its speed. A cockroach with a red shell sporting white diamonds followed the trail precisely, but that bug moved at a snail’s pace. The bug with the orange shell that Abraham decorated with black swirls soon became his favorite, for that cockroach moved with both precision and speed, so much so that Abraham wondered if that bug might’ve been especially blessed by the Maker.
