My house, 10:00am yesterday: Normal day, friend! Nothin to see here!
My house, 2:00pm yesterday: A late lunch today, huh? Time sure does fly in lockdown!
My house, 6:00pm yesterday: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
As I walk down the stairs of my house, the very first thing I notice is how goddamn loud it is. What is it? Flies.
Hundreds, possibly thousands, of flies.
In my living room.
I’ve been dealing with a lot of pest control issues this summer: Big family of mice. A couple roaches. A small, but steady number of flies. Standard life stuff. Frustrating, but not panic-worthy.
As such, I’ve already got some fly paper and some homemade fly traps out, and they’re all empty. Not a single fly in ’em.
God, I wish I’d taken more pictures. I could not walk without ramming my face into dozens of The Swarm.
Clearly, I’ve made some horrible miscalculation. There’s a dead mouse in the walls, or maybe a loaf of bread fell behind the counter, or maybe I just left a big ol’ pork loin out on the couch for 6 months while I hid away in my bedroom contemplating the meaning of life.
As far as I could tell, it’s none of those things.
- The garbage can is empty- trash day was the day before.
- There are no weird smells in the house.
- The basement, the bedrooms, the bathroom, the backyard? All fly-free.
- All food is either sealed or in the fridge. The flies aren’t swarming the bread, cereal, or crackers that are out.
It was the sound that was making me panic. It was SO LOUD. I poke around for a while, looking inside cupboards, behind furniture, under rugs- anything to get a clue on the source of the flies. Eventually, this quest took me to my own front door- the only place in the whole house the flies WERE swarming.
Me: Oh, I understand. There’s a dead animal on my porch, and the flies have found a way in. Okay. I’m just gonna hold my breath and get this done.
So I step outside, and I find…
Nothing. Not a damn thing.
Well, that’s not true. I did find one thing:
A wasp nest that size could straight up kill somebody. And that somebody’s probably gonna be me.
Under normal, non-covid circumstances, I might deal with this myself. Grab something to breathe through, grab some neurotoxins, and get to work. But a bunch of the stores around me have been closed for months, including the Lowe’s, and I have no idea who else might be selling them. I also really want to not-get-covid because I’m currently signed up for vaccine testing.
So it’s time to call in the pros.
Well, the pros want $250. Maybe it’s time to go on a scavenger hunt for some deadly poison that’ll have some horrible side effect, like make me lose sensation in my fingers* so I can never type again.
Neighbor: Hey, Matt!
Me: Heyyyyy Neighbor. We have a problem.
Neighbor: Jesus Christ Lord have mercy what the…
Neighbor: THAT WAS NOT THERE LAST WEEK
Me: Yeahhhhhhhh… I called around and it seems like the going rate for wasp removal is around $250, so I’m trying to think up some new ways to handle this situation.
Neighbor: $250? Fuck, I’ll spend a thousand dollars I’m not fuckin with this!
Me: Well, it’s on both of our houses, let’s at least split the cos-
Neighbor: Give me the number, I’m callin’ RIGHT NOW
So the exterminator is coming, probably early next week. I just have to hunker down until then and hope I don’t get swarmed. Neighbor calls the pest control place, and with a contented sigh, I return to the safety and sanitation of the indoors.
Me: Oh, right. The flies.
Fun fact: They didn’t leave when they saw the wasps.
Maybe I should burn the house down.
But I did notice something strange: There were fewer flies. Like, substantially fewer. I go to look at the traps, and…
This dumb thing is so full that it won’t trap any more flies. I have to empty it and make a new one.
The whole reason I came down at 6 was to make myself a nice little dinner. I was gonna have a big plate of tacos, and they were gonna be delicious. But I’m not staying in this godforsaken fly-infested nightmare palace any longer. I make the World’s Most Decent Shitty Depression Microwave Noodles brand shitty microwave noodles and I retreat to the safety of the air conditioning, where I can write all this down contemporaneously so that my therapist can pinpoint the exact source of my PTSD.
I’m trying to wrap my brain around this whole thing. Some time between 2pm and 6pm, a massive swarm of flies invades, my house. Or worse, the maggots that were already there grew up all at the same time. At 6, the traps were empty. By 7:30, they were all full. This means that I came downstairs around the same time the flies showed up. Right? Am I losing it**?
I eat my Shitty Noodles, fuck around for a few more hours, feel a little more rage and existential dread, and then it’s time for bed.
Now we’re at today. I put my clothes on and I go downstairs, ready for Some New Horror.
And there’s nothing. No bzzzzzz, no obnoxious flies, not a single god damn thing.
The fly paper has flies on it.
The homemade traps have, like, a couple flies in them? But not many.
But this was the scene that really caught my attention:
I inspect all the corners of my living room and my kitchen.
There are no living flies. Only the fallen bodies of the, I assume, honored dead.
So I made my breakfast. And I ate it. And I returned to my tiny corner of normalcy.
Clearly my house is cursed.
Would anyone like to buy it off me?
Shudder.
I’m so glad you remembered what Jack told us when we visited him. Fantagraphics had a fly infestation last year, too. It was miserable. The source turned out to be a huge deposit of fly eggs near the trash cans. We used those same fly catchers you used and spent days using electric fly swatters. Must have killed hundreds. Eventually, they all vanished. No recurrence. But wasps! Holy insect terror!
“Matt, I’ve been telling people what they should do with their lives for a long time, and let me tell you: You’re tall, you’re strikingly handsome: You should be an actor.”
I have that burned into my brain forever.