fly. trap.

My house is full of flies. I detest flies. Everything about them makes me feel squeamish and sick to my stomach. I have an entire walled off stash of childhood memories related to flies: Aunt Joyce and Uncle Phil's broken down farmhouse with its always open, unscreened windows. It was full of flies which we kids pursued with rolled up magazines and straw flyswatters.

The on-the-porch "bathroom" at the cabin at 99 Springs, filled as it was with the heads of catfish, bluegill, crappie and the occasional bass, was also alive with flies of the worst kind. Sweet Daddy, so proud of his little girls' fishing skills, lined the bathroom with drying fish heads, mouths propped wide with sticks, hundreds of them gazing with filmy eyes at those who dared to sit on the stool.

The slaughterhouse at Uncle Bill's farm outside of Dodge City, even in early spring at hogkilling time, always attracted those particularly horrid dark blue, slow moving flies. The blood running from the slaughterhouse pooled in back and the flies blanketed the surface of the bloody lake in an irridescent glaze.

Grandmother Jesse sending us with swatters to swish flies from around the men gutting fish. Grandmother Wilhelmina smashing them with her fingers, she who, in her proud Russian-German peasanthood, was occasionally given to blowing her nose on the hem of her dress, an act which elicited screams of horror from her uppity second generation grandchildren.

Flies. I hate them. And I hate the means of getting rid of them. Swatting makes me sick. They burst into a smear of hairy blackness, always with a little spot of bright red blood. If they fall to the floor without completely smashing, they're prone to coming back to life, evidence that they surely do come from hell, as I've always believed. One wretched summer when I was eight, the washer having quit at home, we carted the clothes to the laundromat. In the hot and humid room, with the machines humming in the background, I stood at the window in a daze, watching the shimmers of heat rising off the pavement. I absentmindedly ran a finger over the window ledge, collecting dust, a dust which, to my horror, proved to be largely compiled of dessicated fly bodies and loose moth wings.

I detest flies and my house is full of them. Suddenly today they're rising out of the basement. I hate the basement, too, housing as it does the washer and dryer and Mo's automatic cat box, dusty Christmas decorations and tubs of old linens. It flooded with this last rain, but there's nothing down there ~ or there shouldn't be ~ that would give birth to or house flies. I don't know where they're coming from, only that they're thick in the basement and I can't stand it, knowing they're there.

I got fly stuff. Window corners which trap the nasty creatures on a sticky pad and keep them hidden so we won't have to witness their death throes. In the basement, huge fly strips, half a dozen long, sticky pads which will lure the hairy horrors to their deaths and expose their struggles for all to see. The backing of the sticky strips is printed with tiny flies, as if the strips are already full. Is this to desensitize the homeowner to the mayhem about to occur? Or is it meant to instill trust in the horrid, buzzing creatures? Maybe some manufacturer's idea of a joke. Ha ha. Opening the box to find what looked like five dead flies, I screeched and dropped it before I realized.

Already there are flies trapped in the window corners, struggling away, though discreetly hidden from view. I just looked inside and there are six ~ already. I haven't had the nerve to check the strips in the basement. Are the struggling flies shrieking in fly agony? The dogs are agitated suddenly; could they be hearing an SOS from the miserable beings in the traps? "As you do unto the least of these" . . . do you think it applies to flies?