It started with a fly. A single, demon fly. Until it was joined by another single, demon fly. (Yeah, I meant single in two ways, unfortunately.)
1 fly + 1 fly = 14+ flies.
Unfortunately.
There are two things that make this math problem even more unfortunate. First of all, it was happening inside my apartment. Second of all, it was compounded, so: 7 flies + 7 flies = 98+ flies. And so on.
The naivety of my roommates and I at the beginning stage is almost funny now. We were almost amused, thinking we had just left the window open too long, killing a fly here and there. Until the problem increased and we realized it was coming from inside the house.
We went a little crazy. We deep-cleaned the whole apartment down to the last corner of the forgotten cupboard, but found nothing. The fly nest was a mystery that we would not soon discover.
We called the landlord, who claimed there was nothing they could do. We called the exterminators, who claimed the same.
The flies kept breeding.
At this point, we were still naive enough to think that the problem would somehow take care of itself if we tried a little bit. We killed the flies slow enough to catch, and left the rest to die.
ROOKIE MISTAKE.
Before we realized it, we had created a super breed of fast, determined zombie flies. They were smart enough not to land. Ever.
We were alone. We were living the apocalypse. There was no going back.
Eventually we got the fly killing down to a science. It was a two-man job that we took in shifts, day in and day out. One person wielding a squirt bottle, catching the flies off guard and weakening them. The other with the swatter, finishing them off.
We got really good at it. Fly killing was second-nature. We were mean, fast, merciless killing machines.
We were living in a world where insect corpses were commonplace, and killing 47 flies during a single lunch break was routine. It was disgusting, but we were so enveloped in the world we no longer had a sense of living-space dignity.
We all went through periods of apathy. "I've made peace with the flies," we would say, "I don't mind them so much anymore." We needed to pull each other out of these hallucinatory states with passionate speeches about our declining quality of life and mental health. Occasionally, one of us would crack and bleach the entire kitchen or buy an expensive-but-useless fly trap. It was a war zone and we were the soldiers.
We had stopped having visitors because we were embarrassed, but after a while we just let people come. We would laugh at their feeble attempts with the swatter. Amateurs.
This mind-numbing battle we were living went on for months. We were beyond exhaustion, we were past the point of questioning what was real and what was right.
The flies were too strong, and they were breeding too fast. This was the end.
Then the exterminator called and said that whoever we had talked to before was full of crap, and they came and sprayed our apartment and our problem was solved.
P.S. Finals week is hard. Also, happy anniversary to my blog! Also, this might be the first post ever without any pictures...too graphic.
