After our month without an oven at the beginning of the year (you don't realize how much you use them until they stop working, so cherish your ovens), we thought we were going to get away without anything else going wrong with our apartment. Last year we experienced bees finding their way inside, melting in 90° heat desperately waiting for our landlord to put in swamp coolers, a few mice getting cozy in our kitchen, waiting months and months to get our janky door replaced, and mold growing in certain parts of the house before our landlord replaced the windows which we previously could not open. But this year, beyond the month without an oven, we hadn't had any other problems.
Until two weeks ago, when Flymaggedon began.
It started subtly, with the occasional fly buzzing around our living room. But soon it grew to four or five a day. Now, this wouldn't have been strange if we had a big hole in the wall, but our windows were secure, the door was rarely opened, and we didn't know how they were getting in here. Until the day my husband went down to the basement to do laundry, and saw a storm cloud of flies whirling around like a gross tornado of death. And, upon opening the washer door, found dozens of dead flies inside. It was then, staring at this disgusting scene with flies buzzing around his head, that something within him snapped. And he swore on the grave of our sullied washer that he would destroy every last fly that found its way up into our apartment from that point onward with a rage I had never seen in him before. This was a broken man. A man who had seen the depths of hell and would never be the same. A man forever changed by a single moment of horror. A man who had a bunch of flies in his house. Wielding his trusty flip flop like the grim reaper's scythe, he avenged our little abode with a fury unmatched by man. He became Captain Ahab, only there were hundreds of white whales tormenting him and he wasn't in a boat.
When we'd come home from running an errand, he would immediately grab his flip flop and search the house for flies, slapping them down in mid-air. When we awoke to buzzing around our heads, he would reach over to where he'd stored his weapon the night before and hunt them down while I hid under the covers. Sometimes I would be in the other room, with relative silence in the house when I'd hear the loud SLAP! of another demon fly meeting its end. He even developed a sixth sense, coming home from work, stopping in the doorway and whispering, "There's a fly in the back room," before running off to destroy it with the bottom of his right flip flop. Over time, the flip flop started to show evidence of the carnage my husband was wreaking. The amount of casualties grew each day. He became a man possessed, drawn into action by the sound of a distant lawn mower emitting a noise that sounded like the soft buzzing of a faraway fly. When we finally invested in a bottle of Raid that he sprayed generously around the basement, he thought he had won. The flies littered the ground like some sort of nightmarish confetti, and the intrusions stopped. For a while. But the mob returned, stronger than ever, and the war waged on.
And, well, it's not over. I don't even know why I chose to write this in the past tense because THIS IS STILL HAPPENING. IT IS RIDICULOUS. But at least it gave me a reason to draw a picture of my Captain Ahab in a victorious pose that may or may not be made into a statue and put in front of our house when this war is finally over. In the meantime, I will let you know if we need recruits. (Or if we die.)
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| He has permanent crazy eyes. |
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