Do you remember that bad scene from The Green Mile?...

In a previous post I mentioned my awesome fly swatter. It is essentially an electrified tennis racket. Two D batteries sit in the handle (gives it some nice heft, let me tell you), and the "web" is made of a wire grid between two plastic grids, complete with a lightning bolt design in the middle. There's a small yellow button in the handle which you press to turn on the "juice". It's bad ass, yo.

The only problem is...it doesn't work. Oh, it zaps. If you hit the fly just after starting the juice, there's a loud pop, a blue spark, and the fly usually sticks to the grid, only dislodged by knocking the swatter against the trash can's side. Sadly, this is a rare occurrence. Most of the time, the flies don't die.

Most of the time, the fly gets a jolt, falls to the ground, and spins around like a helicopter with a broken rotor. If I hit it hard enough and give it some momentum, it ends up on the patterned rug or behind a piece of furniture, only to reappear five minutes later--a little slower, perhaps, but still flying.

That is if it doesn't get stuck to the grid and buzz madly, giving out a little more smoke each time I hit the button to try and zap it out of existence. Usually there's a little smoke and a bad, burnt smell in the air by the time the fly stops moving.

I'm not sure how to feel about this. The hippie side of me wants to cry for the pain and suffering and agony the fly is going through--that I'm making it go through. The cynical side of me wants the damned thing to die already and quit making such a smelly, smokey racket. The part of me raised by David, my stepfather, wants to see if the fly will eventually explode or burst into flame if I hold the button down long enough.

Yeah, that last part disturbs me, too.

The best part of all this?

There are dozens of flies living in the mud room just outside the apartment door. We're not sure where they came from, but they're there, and they're multiplying. And they keep finding ways into our apartment.

This is going to get nasty.