Dammit, I KNOW I didn't imagine this short story

Okay, I’ve checked Google and Amazon and can’t find any information on it. I’m going to use it for my final English essay, but first I need to get a copy of it.

The author’s name is Clarice Lispector. The story is about a woman who kills the cockroaches in her apartment. The plot is narrated four times, and each time it delves deeper into the symbolism and the meaning of the event. It turns into a musing on genocide and several other things. The title might be “Cockroaches” or “Killings” but I can’t remember.

  1. What’s the title of the story?

  2. Which book collection can I find it in? I know it’s been translated.

The school library can pick it up from there. Thanks in advance.

There’s a novel of Lispector’s entitled The Passion According to G. H. that’s full of roaches and some deep thoughts they engender. Ring a bell?

No, this thing is about eight pages long.

Hey. I was also going to suggest The Passion According to GH, since it seems to match what you asked for pretty well (apart from being a novel). I work in a university library with an enormous Latin American literature collection; I’ve just checked all our Lispector short story collections, every book of analyses of Lispector’s writings, and some Lispector bibliographies, and I can’t find what you’re looking for. I’m wondering if maybe the story you’re asking about was excerpted from The Passion According to GH; that’s the best I can come up with. Sorry, man.
-KillerFig

OH! WAIT!

I e-mailed my all-wise English teacher, who informed me that the story is called “The Fifth Story” and it’s from a collection called Sudden Fiction INternational.

Sorry about that. I had you people searching for some pretty obscure stuff. If this wasn’t one of my favorite short stories, I’d have given up on it.