Plague of Flies

After the wasps, the flies.

For the last two days I have been plagued with houseflies. Fat ones, skinny ones, they’re flying back and forth between the two large windows on the first floor, and they even penetrated the upper storey last night. Lacking a flyswatter, I’ve been using my telephone bill to kill them, which is far more fun than actually paying the bill...but sort of gross.

This is driving me nuts. My eyesight has become hyper-sensitive to small black things that fly horizontally. I killed about two dozen of them on Wednesday, and that seemed to be the end of it. Then, on Thursday, a whole new swarm appeared, all bright-eyed and bushy-thorax’d. There are more of them today, and when I killed the latest one there were SQUIRMING MAGGOTS inside it. I will not allow these creatures to use my apartment for cheap sex.

My phone bill is a real mess. I have become the fearsome, silent killer of housefly mythology.

I have cleaned everything and removed all household waste, scrubbed the sinks and the stove-top, swept floors, filtered the litterbox. I washed and took out those empty bottles of booze that I tend to collect. I can’t imagine where they could be coming from, unless there’s a hole in one of my screens (but I doubt it). Are they spontaneously generating? Are they the devil?

I grew up on a cow farm so I know how to kill flies. Still, that hasn't stopped me from doing some research online, and I’m delighted by some of the new-fangled, urban methods that people recommend. None of them will inspire me to retire my phone bill (and actually pay it), but chasing flies around with a vacuum cleaner or applauding them at close quarters seems comic.

On top of all this, I notice that a shifty-looking wasp is visiting the elaborate, rustic pipe on the side of my house that the power lines come through. I worry that another nest is developing in there. In a moment of fury I sprayed hairspray and mouse into the cracks around the pipe, before realizing I was messing with a potentially lethal electric charge and revealing powerful secrets of hair-care to unworthy insects. So I followed up by filling the cracks with “DAP Kwik Seal." No self-respecting wasp will be stopped by such a wimpy sealant, but maybe they’ll decide that my apartment is more trouble than it's worth.

Then I'll be safe. Until the locusts come.