The Great Summer Fly Swat of '07 * June 20, 2007

Hail Fellow Soldiers in the Fight for Mammal Supremacy,

    “I need what I need,” Zoe said.  She’s three and she was talking about snack foods.  But I totally get where Zoe’s coming from—totally.

    I need what I need too.

    And what I need is for my kitchen to be totally fly free—totally.  Once upon a medieval time, human beings theorized that flies erupted spontaneously from rotting meat.  They called it The Rotting Meat (Surprise! There’s Flies) Factor.  Now we know that flies erupt spontaneously from black plastic garbage bags stored for days, even weeks, in the family garage.  We call it The Rotten Kid (Surprise! The Garage is a Maggot Factory) Factor. 

    You know the kid I’m talking about.  The kid whose sole family responsibility is to take out the family garbage—on Mondays and Thursdays.  The kid without a sense of time passing,  visual recognition skills, or nasal passages.  The kid that when you make good on your threat to start piling the family garbage in their beds simply curls up on top of the black plastic mound and starts snoring.  Those kids.  Sometimes they’re adults, but I don’t want to talk about that—way, way too painful.

    What I want to talk about is flies.  The flies that spontaneously combusted in my kitchen two days ago and held me at knife point for a couple of tedious seconds.  By last count there were eighty-seven flies and me.

    It was eighty-seven flies, me, one dishcloth dipped in water, and the great fly swat of ‘07 was on.

    The door banged open.  “What on earth are you doing?” a grown child in-law asked, holding a grandkid with a poop filled diaper.  A small cloud of buzzing insects hovered near the child’s sagging pants.

    Twirling the dishcloth above my head, I spun on one toe, and with a flick of my wrist smashed the kitchen counter in front of me.  Two fly corpses flipped end over end to the floor below. 

    “I’m killing flies.”

    Zoe started to help me.  “There’s one over there Ya-Ya. Get ‘em.  Get ‘em.”  She started jumping up and down.  I slapped the counter behind me without turning around.  A fly crumpled.

    “You know,” my daughter offered, as she stuffed my garbage can full of greasy fast food wrappers, sacks, straws, cups, lids, and napkins from her car,  “all these flies are probably because you have horses.”

    “My horses are so clean you can eat off them.”  I froze, watching a half a dozen flies sail into a holding pattern over the now bulging garbage can.  My one-year old grandson stumbled through the kitchen dragging his French fry encrusted “blankie.”

    I watched three flies line up on the edge of the sink, and then I crushed them.

    My youngest son wandered through the killing fields of the kitchen, opened the door to the garage, looked at the stacks of fermenting garbage, and observed, “Man, there are a lot of flies around here.”  He stood in the open doorway as flies poured in.  He continued, “And last night I heard a gang of raccoons trying to bash their way through the garage door with a battering ram.  I’m pretty sure the raccoon king said, ‘Take what booty you can find,  but the redhead is mine!’” 

    I snapped him with the dishcloth.  “Take out the garbage, Lord of the Flies.”

    “It’s not Thursday,” he muttered.  A fly landed on my forehead, between my eyes. 

    “But I need it to be Thursday,” I yelled, trying to flick the fly on my forehead with the dishcloth without putting out my own eye.  “I need what I need.”

    Zoe looked at me sadly, took my hand, and said, “Me too, Ya-Ya, me too.”  She sighed.  Then I sighed.  Then I showed her the proper way to flick her wrist when killing flies with a wet dishcloth.  It’s a great southern skill that never goes out of style.  I believe that it’s our duty to pass down fly killing skills to the younger generation.  Don’t you?

Linda (Smack Down) Zern

Powered by CityMax.com