Sometimes, nature proves its place in the world hierarchy with an act of simple dominance, even from the smallest of creatures. Skunks end a wedding reception early by hosing down the cake. Ants ruin a picnic by crawling up your shorts and tickling your bits.
My latest brush with nature’s simple power is a group of house flies that seems to have built some sort of teleportation device that allows them to appear out of thin air right in the middle of my kitchen.
At least that’s my best explanation for what’s happening at my house right now. For more than a month, my family’s tranquility has been interrupted several times a day by giant flies that appear out of nowhere and proceed to waft around the house at the same lazy pace as an old man wandering the aisles of a drugstore looking for socks.
I find it weird and unsettling. My wife finds the closest shoe and slams into every inch of wall and every piece of furniture until either the fly is dead or the cops arrive.
Suffice it to say that my wife is upset by the flies, which by default means that I am upset by the flies. We complained enough to our landlords that they decided to lick the problem by calling in a “detective.” The gumshoe arrived and poked around the house, took some DNA samples, looked through our trash and then rounded up a bunch of flies for questioning.
The detective closed the book on our case by declaring he had no idea where the flies were coming from. I’m assuming he then handed our landlords a bill for $8,000.
My hope is that the detective is pulling a Columbo on these flies. He’ll pop by next week wearing a trench coat and chomping on a cigar, ask the flies what time they dropped off their dry cleaning on Sunday. On the way out he’ll say “Uhhhhh, one more thing: The dry cleaner is closed on Sundays. How do you explain that?”
Then the flies will break down, show him their elaborate tunnel system or teleportation device or whatever, and then they’ll surrender themselves to be executed by electric swatter.
Sadly, I don’t have high hopes for an ending like that. It’s more likely they’ll just keep popping up in our kitchen until the weather turns cold. That leaves us to do what all good citizens are doing these days: Take the law into our own hands. Of course, through the process of evolution, natural selection and Oprah’s Book Club, it has fallen to me, the man of the household, to act as the primary fly assassin.
My weapon of choice is a twisted up receiving blanket that I use to whip the flies out of the air like a Dad Ninja. It’s elegant like a light sabre, deadly like a loaf of bread. When the whip fails, hand-to-fly combat commences with whatever smashy weapon is nearby (except, of course, a hand — gross).
We’ve also unwittingly stumbled into a bit of psychological warfare with some super-sticky strips we’ve put on the windows. They aren’t very effective at attracting flies but when one lands on them by random chance, they’re stuck there for good. What that means is that the free flies must watch their stuck brothers twist and turn and slowly lose hope.
I don’t believe in torture — I’m no terrorist or Donald Trump — so I do my best to dispose of them before they suffer too much. But that sticky stuff is really, um, sticky, so legs, wings, heads sometimes get left behind.
So now the flies are still appearing out of nowhere and making themselves at home but we’ve got windows adorned with dead fly body part art. Nature — let’s call it a draw.
Andy Prest is the sports editor for the North Shore News and writes a biweekly lifestyle column.
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