This Post Is Not About Flies

Let’s talk about flies for a second, just to set the stage for last night’s events. Anyone with children has become used to the idea that there will be flies in the house sometimes. This is not because children are unclean, which they are, but because children believe door hinges are sacred objects, and that to use them any more than absolutely necessary is to risk invoking the wrath of the door hinge gods. A child going outside to pick blackberries a block away from home will leave the door open on their way out because, well, they’ll be coming back through that door at some point and they don’t want to close it without good reason. The phrase “but I’m coming back in” has been wielded by children all over the world as an all powerful talisman against the bogeyman of needlessly closed doors, and it has worked for them. Along these same lines, a child also believes a conversation is only valid if one member of the conversing group is standing in an open doorway. As an experiment, I once gave one of my daughters a stern lecture about leaving the door open. I included all of the normal reasons, including incoming bugs and outgoing conditioned air. I gave her this talk *while she was standing in an open door*, distractedly swatting at the bugs that were attempting to fly past her, upstream into our house, their little wings working courageously against the torrents of powerful, conditioned air that were pouring out of our house in the opposite direction. I kept this talk going as long as possible, and never once did it sink in that she was currently doing exactly what it was that I was telling her not to do. For reference, both of my school aged children are straight A students. It’s just a kid thing.

So, the above is basically my excuse for having the occasional fly in my house, but as the title above states, that’s not what this is about. This is about what happened around 2am last night, in my bedroom (don’t get your hopes up). Let’s start with this: For those of you who don’t know it, the primary purpose of a man’s leg during sleep is temperature regulation. A little warm? Expose one foot. Really warm? Uncover an entire leg. Arctic chill? Retract both legs fully into the blanketed warming area. (Yes, I am aware that brings us dangerously close to being reptiles. Take it where you will.). Well last night fell into the “a little warm” category, and as such I had one foot properly exposed, as diagrammed in the male body temperature regulation manual. At some point after 2am, I felt a slight… crawling… on my ankle. My first thought was “Damnit, there’s a fly in here”. I shook my ankle once, frustrated in the knowledge that we were about to begin the fly version of “wash-rinse-repeat” in which every 30 seconds for the rest of the night I would shake my foot and the fly would take off, circle the room once, then say “Oh hey, look at that! A foot to land on!” and we would start all over again. Anyone who has played this game knows the joy of it. They fly, however, did not leave when I shook my ankle, so harnessing my growing irritation I gave it another really, really good shake. That’s when the fly… skittered. That’s the best word I can think of. It skittered up my ankle, squeezing itself between my calf and the bed. This brought me “moderately” more awake (in the sense that the Titanic “moderately” sank beneath the ocean), and allowed me to ascertain several things:

• The creature was much, much larger than a fly
• The creature was hard and spiky
• The creature was moving at a rapid pace up my leg towards regions where hard, spiky creatures are strictly forbidden (unless you’re Richard Gere).

At this point I did what any red blooded American male would do: I levitated. I’m not sure if any muscles were actually involved in this, or if it was sheer will power alone. I’m not even sure if I “rose” into the air, or if I just teleported to a position approximately three feet above the mattress. Either way, that’s where I went. Once there, I rotated face down and sure enough, there below me was a dark, fast moving thing roughly the size of a large pecan. The thought “house fly” was quickly replaced with the obviously more correct thought: “daemon imp from the blackest pits of hell”. After a brief moment of reflection, I came to the conclusion that sharing my bed with a skittering, spiky, daemon imp was probably not going to work out for the best. That decision made, and still hovering in the air, I called upon my years of martial arts training and assaulted the creature with an attack best described as “one man slap fight at 200 frames per second”. One of the approximately 4,000 blows I got off in the first 1.3 seconds of levitation made contact with the daemon imp, hurling it into and almost through the bedroom wall. This was good, because the sheets were already beginning to smolder from the friction created by my humming bird like assault on the creature. I was in no way reassured by the loud crack it made on impacting the wall, but I nevertheless allowed gravity to resume its normal governance over my body and lowered myself carefully to the floor. Upon inspecting the carnage I discovered that my adversary had, in its dying moments, managed to transmorgiphy itself from daemon imp into a dinner plate sized cockroach, which I think you’ll agree was infinitely more horrible. Well played, daemon imp.

So now I had a dead cockroach and a heartbeat of around 830 beat per minute to deal with. For the cockroach, I gathered him up in several large paper towels and headed to the bathroom, past my wife who was already up “doing things that mothers do in the middle of the night when they have a six week old child”. That’s when I made a fatal mistake, flushing away any chance I may have had of getting back to sleep that night (not that there was much of one to begin with). My wife asked “what was all of that?” and in my complete and total ignorance I replied “A cockroach just crawled up my leg while I was in bed”. You see what I just did there, don’t you? The shudder that went through her body at those words actually rattled dishes in the kitchen. Before I opened my mouth about it there had been exactly one half of the matrimonial bed that had to deal with heebie jeebies for the rest of the night. Now it was a clean sweep. Instead of lying down beside a beautiful, happy, tired young woman I was now going to be sleeping beside the equivalent of a blue fin tuna wired to a car battery. And I was pretty much in the same state. In fact it was fun, because we were close enough to set each other off, arcing back and forth like a pair of shock therapy patients on relays. One gets a jolt, the other gets a jolt. Yay us. And let me be honest, we went off several times during the remainder of the night, each of us convinced that every crease and crevice in the sheets was actually the starting line for the “Next Great Roach Race for the Crotch”. I may be exaggerating slightly there, but I don’t think so. Sleep was not an easy mistress last night.

So here I am this morning, once again tired and out of sorts. I left my wife at home this morning with very explicit instructions in regards to the exterminator we supposedly employ (the “explicit” part referring to the language she should use with them). I want to come home and see that our house has assumed the natural color of pesticide. I want to see already dead things digging themselves out of the ground to get away from our house. I want an old Indian man to walk right out of a Stephen King novel and tell me not to bury anything in the back yard, because the ground has “gone sour”. I’m calling in the exterminator, the catholic church, and the national guard because I don’t care how long you live in a house, to the question “how many times over a ten year period should a cockroach crawl across your sleeping body” the correct answer is indisputably “none”.

The Silver Lining: The funniest sounds you will ever hear are those made by someone who thinks a bug is crawling up their leg, even if that someone is you.