A fly went by

For the past few weeks, I was plagued by a fly.

It could, of course, have been far worse.

I’ve had mice on occasion. Mice, of course, don’t make buzzing noises in your ear. But no one wants to hear one scratching in the wall, or spy one – EEK! – scurrying across the floor. Let alone fine those tiny little scats, or buttons that have been dethreaded.

And this is the city. It could be – even though I’ve only seen them on the outskirts of my building – a rat.

One of those sightings was recent.

I was taking my trash out at 6:30 a.m., trying to make sure that those nasty nocturnal rats wouldn’t gnaw into it. I tossed my bag on top of the pile o’ bags from our building, and out sped a rat that hadn’t gotten the message that rats are supposed to be gone by dawn. If you’ve ever asked yourself whether rats can climb trees, the answer is yes.

It could have been a bedbug. Having suffered through a bedbug scare a number of years ago – my husband and I came back from a trip to NYC with what looked suspiciously like a couple of bedbug bites on our legs – I don’t want to go through that again. Fortunately, we didn’t bring any back in our luggage. We chalked it up to this kind of seedy French bistro we used to go to whenever we were in The City.

It could have been a snake, which I hadn’t thought of as much of an urban possibility until recently. I.e., when I saw on the news that a giant but fortunately non-venomous snake had slithered its way into someone’s kitchen in the ex-urb but quite urby town of Medford and bitten their 9-month old.

So, yeah, it could have been worse than a fly.

But this was no ordinary fly.

I swear, it was the size of a sparrow. Or a hummingbird at least. Truly, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find Jeff Goldblum’s head on this beast.

And for such a big sucker, it moved pretty fast.

The first time I saw it, it buzzed me in my den while I was sitting there making myself crazy watching MSNBC.

By the time I got up and grabbed my can of Raid and my flyswatter, it was gone.

A couple of days later, it came roaring back into the den. By that time, I had the Raid near at hand. So I sprayed a tiny bit, closed the door, and left it to rot.

But I never did find the carcass, and surely the carcass of a fly the size of a sparrow hummingbird (with or without Jeff Goldblum’s head) would be findable.

Anyway, it did seem to have disappeared.

But, no.

There it was again. Upstairs, when the flyswatter and Raid were downstairs.

I chased it around with a towel for a bit, but it never lit anywhere. It just buzzed off, I’m guessing through the HVAC ducts. (No open windows here, other than in the kitchen, and they’re screened.)

Then the nervy bastard was back again. In my bedroom.

I was reluctant to spray Raid in my bedroom, but did so anyway. Desperate times, desperate measures and all that. I sprayed directly at it.

Impervious to the poison that was gagging me, it buzzed right by my ear, took a sharp right out the door, and flew into my office, a tiny little room where I trapped it.

Again, I sprayed Raid directly on it, and it made a beeline – flyline? – for my face. And then it seemed to drop midflight.

I haven’t looked all that hard, but I haven’t found the carcass quite yet. I’ll give it a few days to dry up before I search again. I really am pretty sure that, this time, I really got it. When I find its desiccated little corpse, I’ll let you know if it looks anything like Jeff Goldblum.