Attack of the Flies

Okay, so I'm not really even sure how to explain this or if the magnitude of the situation is going to come across. Sometimes with things like this, it's hard to tell.

Yesterday I came home after accordion and made a salad and read my book and then a friend came over and we sat on the couch talking as the room slowly went dark with evening. To clarify, there was never a time when I was just sitting around with all the doors open. The doors were shut. Our windows have screens. I didn't notice any flies.

But then we left the house for half an hour and when I came home there were a couple of flies buzzing lazily around the kitchen like they had been there forever. You know how flies are. They drone around. You can't ignore them. They seem obsessed with being wherever you are, the dogs of the insect world, and then they are wily, acrobatic, and unwilling to be caught (or rather, squished).

I noticed those two in the kitchen with some despair, looping in the circles near the ceiling like they would be there forever, and then one came to rest on the cupboard. Right in front of me. I went for it. I smashed it with a sponge. And to my surprise it worked. You know how it usually is. You swipe through the air with your weapon and they just keep going, somehow avoiding you by millimeters. Whatever was going on with these flies was different. They may have been drunk. Or weak. Or unaware they were dealing with someone so ruthless. I killed that one with the sponge. Then I killed one in the bathroom with a French Vogue (Last year's September issue when Carine Roitfield was still there and obviously massive). I killed another one in my room by swiping it out of the air with a clog. I mean, this is not typical right? First try fly killings? Finally, right before I went to bed, I found another buzzing near the window which I swatted with my hardback Faulkner novel (I'm deep in a southern gothic binge right now), again totally killing it. That's four flies. In the course of about twenty minutes.

I would like to note that I picked up all of these fly corpses with a small piece of tissue and disposed of them properly. I said sorry to the first one. After a while it just got mechanical.

In the morning, I was telling Sam about it and I noticed one on the floor near the bed. A carcass. Cause of death unknown. This was strange enough with all the recent fly attacks, but then I went to put shoes on. Dead fly in my shoe! Neatly placed in the heel of the left shoe. I thought Sam was messing with me but he wasn't. He promised he wasn't. It was just there.

I've thought about it quite a bit and my conclusion is that our apartment may be haunted.