Bug Wars

This is me complaining about bugs. They are nasty. I hate them. They enjoy invading my apartment.

It started with cockroaches when I first moved in. And I’m talking about gigantic American mutant cockroaches, not the little wimpy German ones. The first one I saw was after I’d lived here a few weeks. I rolled out of bed to get ready for work and went into the bathroom to make myself look presentable. A second or two after I turned the light on, I heard this scratching noise coming from directly above. At first I thought it might be a bird on the roof. I noticed something odd in the mirror: there was something moving in the overhead light. I turned to look at it, and I could see through the milky plastic that there was a huge, HUGE, probably two-inch-long cockroach spazzing out in the light cover. It was trapped in there, so I didn’t scream or anything, but I stared until it stopped moving (fried by the lightbulb). Since I’m only five feet tall and I don’t have a step ladder or anything tall enough to stand on to reach the light myself, I had to call the leasing office to have a maintenance guy come over and get the thing out. I haven’t seen another one that enormous inside my apartment since then, although I did see one crawling on the ceiling in the vestibule some time later (ew).

The next time I encountered a roach in my place, I wasn’t as calm and collected as I was the first time. This time, my dad was over hanging curtains, so he got to witness the whole thing. The roach was in the dining room lying on its back as if dead. I bent to pick it up with a paper towel, and it woke up and started crawling around on the towel. I screamed bloody murder, probably freaked the shit out of my neighbors, started running, got about two feet before I fell over a chair, scrambled up, got another two feet before I tripped and fell down again. Screaming the whole time. (The second time I fell, I stayed down.) My dad just looked at me and said, “Krista Michelle, it’s a cockroach.” I think he ended up killing the little bastard for me. I haven’t seen another roach since.

Then it was fleas. About a month and a half ago, I was sitting in the dining room, tap-tapping on the laptop as I’m wont to do when bored, when I felt a tickle and saw a flea frolicking around my arm. Now, I’m more familiar with fleas than I would like to be. When I was a kid, between the ages of 8 and 11, one of my dogs had a flea problem. For some reason, the fleas liked me best of everyone, because I was covered in bites but I don’t remember my brother or my parents complaining about them. It was hell. There were tiny little black things (I’m guessing flea eggs or something) all over the dog and on my bedspread, and I was getting bitten all the time. I itched constantly. Apparently, since it only affected me and the dog, the parents felt it wasn’t necessary to do anything about it. Anyway, when I found the monster flea hopping up my arm that night about a month ago, I thought it was probably the biggest flea I’d ever seen. It was about the size of three normal fleas rolled together. At work, I joked that I didn’t have fleas, I had just one flea that ate all the other fleas. I don’t have a pet, and I haven’t seen any dogs around. I’m guessing someone in my building has a housecat and they’ve let it get fleas. Fortunately, my flea problem was short lived this time around; after about three weeks, I wasn’t being bitten anymore, and I didn’t see any hopping around. Just to be safe, I still called in the flea sprayers last week. Since then, I haven’t seen one or been bitten, so I’m hoping that epoch is over.

The most recent installment in my epic battle against insects started just a few days ago with an insurgence of flies. After the zombie roach incident (in which I almost died trying to get away from it), a friend gave me an electric flyswatter for Christmas. Best Christmas gift ever. Unfortunately, I never had an opportunity to use it, because I hadn’t seen any bugs. I wished I would get a chance to use it, because I thought it would be cool. Careful what you wish for. Over the last two days, I have killed nearly 20 flies (I shit you not). Every time I think I’ve got the last one, I notice another one. They like to buzz around the lightbulbs over my bathroom mirror. Every few hours, I roll my blinds up to see if there are any around the window—another favorite place of theirs. It’s not like they’re here eating my trash; my apartment is clean. I clean the whole place once a week. Today I called my dad and complained, and he said it’s probably the change in the weather that’s brought them on. Does this mean I’ll be killing flies all summer?

At least they’re not scorpions.