Thick as Flies

I walked home from lunch the other day in tremendous heat and humidiy. As I gained the steps, I noticed flecks on the window behind the mini-blinds. I walked in the back door, lifted the blinds, and realized these flecks were a bevy of flies.

The spectacle of 60 to 70 flies hanging on my kitchen window rapidly took away my appetite. So, I rolled up a newspaper and began swatting away. Whack, splat, whack, splat. I got out window cleaner to tidy up the carnage splayed across the glass and soon realized that ammonia-based cleaner did double duty: it suffocated flies and cleaned up their carcasses at the same time.

After work that day, I called up my mother to see if she too was overrun with flies. She had not suffered the same plague, it seemed, but she did recall her childhood when flies were a pestilance.

"They were thick," she recalled. "Sanitation was bad and flies were everywhere." She said she would help her mother cover everything in the kitchen before spraying it down with a pesticide.

"Thick clouds of flies - they would be everywhere," she said.

She also opined that my recent infestation could have been caused by eggs hatching in the windowsill. I suspect it is from the screen that the dogs broke out, however.

Whatever the cause, a thick swarm of flies in the kitchen is one of the grossest things I have encountered recently.

It rivals only the flying ants that we had in our basement cubicles a few weeks ago.