A fly-blown night

I’ll try to make a blog today, but I don’t know if I’m up to it, cause I really didn’t get much sleep last night. I’d gotten in bed and was just about to turn out the light, when I see this fly buzzing around. I was really tired, and I wanted to ignore him and go on to sleep, but I couldn’t stop thinking that as soon as I was asleep he would land on my face and start walking around on my mouth. In fact, I sleep with my mouth a little bit open—it’s a lot cuter than it sounds—so there’s no guarantee that he wouldn’t walk right in my mouth. That wouldn’t be good for either of us, but you know flies are not that smart, and there’s no telling what they’re liable to do.

The prospect of mouth flies seemed totally unacceptable to me, so I got up and looked around for something to hit him with, but the only thing readily available was a pair of Jockey shorts that I had thrown on top of the dresser instead of putting in the drawer. I tried those but they were too floppy, and besides I got to thinking that if I did squash the fly with my underwear I’d have to throw them away because there’s no way I’d be wearing anything with smushed fly on it.

Besides, while I was chasing him around with the underwear he flew into the closet, so I shut the door and stuffed some dirty clothes into the crack at the bottom, and figured I’d deal with it in the morning. But then I went to the bathroom, and when I got back he had somehow gotten out and was flying around the room again, all abuzz with excitement about his great escape.

Anyway, I was pretty much awake by now, so I put on my shoes and went out on the back porch to get the fly swatter. We actually have a collection of four flyswatters that we keep in the flyswatter area, but the only one I like is the turquoise plastic one with the wire handle. There’s another one that’s all plastic, but it doesn’t work too well, and another one that has a wire handle but with a wire mesh head instead of the plastic. You can kill a fly with it, but the trouble is that the squashed flies tend to get stuck in the wire mesh, and once they’ve dried there’s no getting them out. With the turquoise plastic one the dead flies just bounce off and fall down behind the couch or whatever. I’m really not sure what happens to them then, if they just disintegrate, or if the cats eat them, or the Roomba gets them, but I never do see them again, and that’s all that matters to me. Out of sight, out of mind.

So now I’m back in the bedroom, wide awake now and armed, but all this fanning around has stirred up my floaters. I had a detached retina a few years ago, and now I have this crap inside my eyeball, little black things that float around and look just like flies. So I’m swatting away at stuff, but there’s not really anything there—it’s just the floaters. Finally, just by pure chance I hit the real fly, and he falls right into one of my black Rockports, that are my favorite shoes. I was really sick of messing with this fly, so I just put the shoe out in the hall, thinking I’d deal with it in the morning, but this morning I didn’t want to deal with it either, so it’s still sitting there. I may have to throw it away, cause I’m not so keen on the idea of wearing a shoe that’s got a dead fly in it. That’s one of the main reasons I prefer to swat them in the living room, cause they just fall behind the couch. That and the light’s better in there.