He made out a cockroach coming at him with such determined ferocity that he stepped aside to curb’s edge.  It still found its regardless way to him, with its antennae and sensors hard at work calculating the threat of his presence.  As was he, he realized.  Wasn’t he — even if unawares — assessing ways by which this creature could cause him grotesque harm?  It could inject him with disease — or, or — crawl up his sandal and force him to have to kill it — or….  He crossed the street.  That cockroach was not safe around him.  It wasn’t that he could crush it at his whim that upset him as much as that to do such a thing was so normal that nobody would make a thing of it.  He decided not to re-cross the street; he’d go home the longer way.  For all the blocks home, he kept from looking below eye-level.  He focused instead on telling himself to grow up.  He needed to see insects crushed underfoot as just a part of the deliberate, unseen, everyday violence of life.  He needed to see that, to get anywhere, it was best to walk with his head up, not looking down.  How to make himself believe it, though, did not occur to him till he realized that, in not looking down, he had made it home far sooner going the longer way.