Shoo Fly

Barb Schoen stood at her kitchen counter and cursed the house flies buzzing around her head. It was always this way come August: long, hot, miserable days filled with the buzzing of black, sticky flies and only the hope of a cool shower to revive her. It made her wonder why she’d ever claimed that summer was her favorite season.

She must have had temporary amnesia at the time. In addition to the fly invasion, her nosey Aunt Lydia always insisted on visiting for two solid weeks during the doggiest of days. The old woman complained continually, especially about Barb’s cooking. The way Aunt Lydia fussed and picked at her food drove Barb crazy. It didn’t matter what she prepared, it never met with her aunt’s approval. Going out wasn’t the answer either. Aunt Lydia had a million ways to embarrass Barb in a restaurant. Barb still couldn’t face the staff at her favorite Mexican place, even years later.

That was bad enough, but Aunt Lydia demanded constant personal entertainment from Barb and Barb’s husband Denny, and found the most imaginative of excuses to snoop through the medicine cabinet. Worse yet, she was due to show up for this year’s visit in two days.

In a fit of pique, Barb waved the serrated kitchen knife in the air in front of her, slashing out at the hovering horde of flies. “Aaahhh!” she yelled primally, taking another swing, but the thought that she might actually hit a fly disgusted her so badly that she quit.

Blowing an auburn curl away from her left eye, she returned to the job of dicing the tomatoes she’d just picked from her garden. It felt good to whack away on the red fruit, to just let go and chop like crazy and use her bottled-up, frustrated energy.

“Jeez, Barb,” Denny said, startling her. The slam of the screen door belatedly announced his arrival from the garden.

Barb looked up at her husband and said, “What?”

He glanced at the red pulp on the chopping board and back at her.

They’d been married long enough to have developed their own non-verbal communication. She knew exactly what he meant—that he’d caught her in the middle of a rage and didn’t approve. She didn’t care.

“We’ve got to do something about these flies or I’ll go crazy,” she said as she rinsed her hands.

He set a basket of plump green peppers on the counter beside her. “Like what?”

“Do we have any bug spray?” For a brief moment, the buzzing dimmed. She dried her hands then bent down to look under the sink.

“We can’t spray the house while we’re fixing dinner.”

“I can’t fix dinner while they’re dive-bombing me either!”

Denny gave her another of his looks, the one that said, “Oh, come on now.” She gave him a look in return: “I’m not kidding.”

“I can get the vacuum and suck them up,” he said.

“Eww!”

“Okay, tell you what. Let’s just eat outside and I’ll set up the tiki torches and citronella candles.” He headed outside.

“Yeah, whatever,” she said to the slamming screen door. “But I’ve got to do something,” she muttered. How can he not be bothered, she thought. She flicked her hand over the bowl that held the tomato pieces, making sure no flies had landed on them, then covered the bowl with plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator.

The fly-swatter hung from a magnetic hook on the side of the fridge. Barb gripped it with grim determination and slammed the business end down on the counter, barely missing the hairy little beast by the sink. She raised it in preparation for another blow, but her target had disappeared. For that matter, so had all the other flies.

She looked around the kitchen and waved the swatter for good measure, but it looked like the flies had flown for cover. “That’s better,” she said aloud as she washed the peppers to add to the salsa.

The heat of the day finally broke as Denny took the tuna off the grill. A cool, light breeze wafted the sweet scent of honeysuckle across the picnic table. At last, Barb allowed herself to relax as the gently moving air kept the flying intruders away.

Once dinner was over and the Sun had slipped below the horizon, Barb and Denny set about cleaning up and settling in for a quiet Sunday evening. She stacked the dirty dishes and carried them inside, but she nearly dropped everything when she walked into the kitchen. A swarm of flies, even larger than the one this afternoon, greeted her.

“Denny! Did you leave a door open?” she asked when he joined her.

“Can’t blame me,” he said. “I was very careful to latch the screen every time I went through it.” He set the dirty utensils in the sink and went back for the last of the glassware. As he stepped outside, Barb watched two more flies sneak in.

“Damn!” She flung her arms madly around, as if she were hacking her way through dense jungle vines. The allure of raw fish juice and vegetable scraps must be what attracted them. She scraped the plates clean and decided to take the trash out immediately to see if that wouldn’t help.

For a moment, while she concentrated on getting the food scraps into the trash, it seemed that all the flies congregated around her, buzzing furiously. The illusion disintegrated the moment Denny returned and the flies were everywhere again.

“Here, let me,” Denny said, taking the trash can from her.

“Thanks.” Barb rinsed the plates off for good measure and piled them into the dishwasher while Denny carried the trash outside. At least half of the swarm followed Denny. That left only dozens of flies behind. Barb reached for the swatter again and got off one good swing before the rest disappeared.

Where the hell did they go? She looked around, squinting to see flies against the dark cabinets of the kitchen. Wait, there’s one! She swung the swatter, but her intended victim flew right past her. She didn’t see where it went. Another glance around satisfied her that the coast was clear.

Barb slipped the swatter back to its hook and wiped down the counters. Her hands shook with exasperation. Maybe she’d have another glass of wine.

Shortly after the 11 o’clock news, Barb and Denny closed up the house for the night and she convinced him to let her go ahead and spray the kitchen.

“Seems kind of silly to spray now. I mean, there’s nothing moving anyway.”

“Maybe so, but I know they’re here somewhere. That many flies don’t just spontaneously leave.”

“As long as it’ll make you happy…”

Barb fogged the kitchen with the spray, then gave the baseboard a shot for good measure and put the can away. She hurried out of the room. “Phew. I feel like I need another shower.”

“Make it quick. I’ve got to get up early in the morning.”

Barb skinned out of her clothes. They smelled like sweat, charcoal smoke, fish and bug spray. Yuck! She’d just run these down to the laundry room now rather than leave them in the hamper in their bedroom. This way she wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night with that stink in the air. Naked, she tiptoed in the dark to the basement and flung her clothes toward the washer. She’d worry about being neat in the morning.

As she made her way past the kitchen, the insecticide fumes invaded her nose, but it was the buzz that made her stop and turn the light on. Three or four big black flies buzzed in a holding pattern in the middle of the room. These were the kind of flies that looked like escapees of a genetics experiment gone wrong; the kind that thrived on chemicals and just kept growing bigger. Exasperated, Barb stomped into the kitchen and snatched up the swatter. She was determined to get herself a trophy. But like magic, the moment her hand touched the handle, the flies were gone.

“Barb, are you coming to bed or what?” Denny’s tired voice called out from the bedroom. He never could fall asleep until she came to bed, too.

“Be right there,” she said. She could feel her heart rate pick up and her breathing quicken, which wasn’t good, considering what it was she was breathing. She dropped the swatter, slapped the lights off and hurried to the shower.

She wasn’t sure how long she’d been standing in the warm water, but it was long enough for her toes to feel wrinkled. There was a knock at the door.

“Yeah?” she asked over the rush of water.

Denny slipped inside and said, “You want a back wash?”

“Sure.”

He slid the shower curtain open just enough to reach inside with one arm. She handed him the soap and turned her back toward him to lather.

“Denny?”

“Yeah?”

She hesitated. How could she ask what was on her mind without sounding crazy? “Promise not to laugh, but it seemed that every time I grabbed the fly swatter tonight, the flies vanished.”

“Well, then use the swatter.” He handed back the soap and rubbed her shoulders.

She leaned into his massage. “That’s not quite what I meant. I didn’t have to even use the swatter. All I had to do was just reach for it. It was like they knew what I was going to do before I did it and they made themselves scarce somehow.”

Denny didn’t say anything to that. He finished his scrubbing and reached into the stream of water to rinse his hand off.

“Denny…?”

He dried his hand on the towel before he looked up at her face and said, “You’re saying they’re psychic?”

“Telepathic, maybe?” she asked back.

“I think you need to get some rest. You worked hard this weekend getting ready for your Aunt Lydia’s visit.” He turned and left.

She was tired all right, but she didn’t think she’d get much sleep.

By the time she got up the next morning, Denny had already left for the office. It was later than she usually slept, but it had been near sunrise when she finally drifted off. Her dreams had been frustrating, as though she were searching for an answer to her problems and they danced just out of her reach.

Just like the flies and her fly-swatter, she thought. As she entered the kitchen, she braced herself for the maddening buzz, but a solitary fly hovered over the sink where Denny had left a used coffee filter to finish dripping.

Maybe the spraying helped after all, she thought. The perfumy stink still hung in the air, so she opened the windows a crack. With a sense of relief, Barb took her first shower of the day.

Once she was clean, she remembered her dirty clothes from last night lying in a heap on the laundry room floor, so she gathered up the rest of the laundry and took it downstairs, too. That was when she discovered where all the flies had gone. They hovered over her clothes like a black cloud. She slammed the door to the laundry room to keep them from escaping to the rest of the house.

She looked around for another swatter, or a newspaper to roll up, but except for the appliances and the clothing, the room was otherwise empty. She noticed that as she was actively looking for a weapon, the flies seemed to decrease in numbers, but the moment she gave up, they returned in force.

What if she thought so hard as to believe that she held a swatter? Would the flies go away? Or were they smart enough to know she was bluffing? Well, she had a captive audience.

She concentrated on the feeling of a fly-swatter handle in her hand; how the rubber-coated loop of wire felt snug in her palm, how her fingers grasped it. She imagined the heft and springiness of the tool, the snap of the thin, webbed plastic slapper when it hit a countertop. She could hear the whish of air as she wielded it against her enemies. She could read the words Plasti-Swat on one side of the molded red plastic and Made in Metropolis, IL on the other. The fly-swatter was real.

Slowly, she opened her senses and brought her attention to the room around her. Her arm was poised to bring down mass destruction upon the invading hordes, but she was alone in the room. She checked the door leading back upstairs, but it was still closed tight. She didn’t know where they went or how they did it and she didn’t care as long as they stayed away from her. She went ahead and loaded up the washing machine, keeping track of where she laid her “swatter.”

Eventually, curiosity overcame her. She took the stairs two at a time and checked the kitchen. No buzzing. She toured the rest of the house. All quiet. She could hardly believe it. One final question nagged at her brain, so she returned to the laundry room and closed the door.

Amid the humming and sloshing of the washing machine, Barb dropped the idea that she held the fly-swatter and instead, imagined a days-old garbage can full of rotting food. The stench of decomposing banana peels and tomato cores about made her gag.

That did it. All around her, the flies were as thick as, well, flies. There was no garbage within fifty feet of the laundry room, and yet the flies were there. If they weren’t clued into her thoughts, she didn’t know how else to explain it.

Once again, Barb held her trusty swatter in her hand, ready to cleanse her world of the black menace, and poof—they were gone. The washing machine ended its cycle and Barb tossed the clean clothes into the drier, then headed to the kitchen for a cup of coffee, and to think about this new-found power.

She sat at the kitchen table, staring out at her backyard through the window. Her smile grew as she realized that she needn’t be bothered by August flies ever again. Summer just got a whole lot more pleasant.

Now, what to do about dear old Aunt Lydia…