2:43 p.m. - Thursday, Jul. 24, 2003
Ms Leslie is not Egyptian

I killed a fly in my apartment the other day. If you spend much time here, you might remember. The little cuss drilled himself bug-eyes first into a pound of soft butter in the glazed butter dish on my cabinet.

Well, as it turns out, he was just one small player in a saga that goes back over two years. It�s the story of my chimney.

I guess I�ve been here three years now, watching the days flicker by like an old movie, wrassling around with my demons and getting prepared for my surgeries and whatever is to become the rest of my life. I rented this little apartment as much because it has a fireplace as anything else, even though I�ve never used it. Early on, I did cook a few hamburgers and steaks on a little BBQ grill that I stuck inside, but I haven�t done that for years.

By the time the first spring arrived at this new apartment, I had given up using the fireplace for anything. I guess now that I look back at it, I should not have been surprised that a mating couple of birds made a nest in the chimney and raised a brood of noisy young�uns in the darkness and the safety they found there. I found it amusing at first to hear the cute little peeps and cheeps from the babies as they waited for their overworked parents to bring them some grub. Or some grubs. They provided a sort of background music; kind of mother nature�s muzak, which intensified into a frantic climax with the landing of each mouthful of food. Later, as the birds grew in size and decibel, they became an annoyance. I found I could silence them for a moment by throwing an empty coke can against the brick of the fireplace, but within hours, they had become accustomed to that noise and I had to go physically clang on the damper inside the firebox to shut them up. And sure enough, soom even that had no impact on them at all. So I was forced to outwait them, living with the constant din coming from my chimney until the day they crowded each other out of the nest and flew off to wherever adolescent birds fly.

Next spring was a repeat performance. And like any sequel, it wasn�t near as entertaining the second time around. I was just flat glad to see them go away again.

Then last spring, I apparently had a third generation in the chimney, and a new nesting pair on my little front porch, right in the middle of my variegated climbing fig. This time, I let them have it all. I left for Thailand in March, right at the peak of the laying season. When I came home a month later, the only sign of bird families was my dried out and destroyed plant. Even so, there is a clear trend. Without question I can expect another family in the chimney this coming spring as well as another nest in whatever I hang under my patio roof. The birds obviously have the upper hand� er� wing.. here.

I could live with that.

Jump to a couple of weeks ago, just before my son arrived from Alaska to visit. I was energetic. I was cleaning every nook and cranny of this little apartment. But strangely, one day, I noticed the smell of decaying meat in my home. At first I tried to deny it. I thought I must be imagining it, or maybe I was having a small stroke. I�ve heard that people sometimes smell strange things when they are in the middle of a stroke. But by the second day, it was clear that this smell was real, inside my home, and quickly becoming a stench. I searched everywhere, but I couldn�t find a thing. Soon though, it became apparent that the smell was coming from my fireplace. Something had dies in my chimney, out of sight but not at all out of mind. I guessed it to be a bird. Maybe there won�t be a nest next spring after all. But in the meantime, the odor of rotten flesh and ammonia became unbearable in the hot weather. I wasn�t sure what to do, so I did what I do best, I waited the problem out.

I knew that whatever was dead up there could only be so big. As big as a squirrel at most. And so in a few days, surely it would dry out and stop stinking. Surely. So I sprayed the area with Lysol and with Glade. I tried to ignore the awful smell, the watery eyes. I told myself over and over that in just a day or two, this problem would solve itself. And I was right. At some point during the week my son was here, the odor abated. Nothing was left but the lingering floral freshness of spring flowers from the Glade can, sanitized by the germ-fighting contents of the Lysol Can. Disinfected flowers. What could be cleaner?

Enter that fly who couldn�t believe it wasn�t butter. He turned up a day or two after my son left. I killed him, he ruined my butter.

The following morning when I turned on the lights, I found my carpet littered with the bodies of dozens of flies. They were in the kitchen too, lying on my clean counters with their little half-dozen feet in the air and 400 little xx�s in their eyes. There was nothing living in my home except me. Had I really killed all these flies when I sprayed the one? If son, where were they and why did I not notice them?

As we both know, I seldom open my front door. I never open windows. I found it hard to believe that all these flies were hiding in my apartment and died all at once from my wholesale gassing of the place.

Then I realized what you probably already have guessed. My chimney had been pressed into service once again as a nursery, only this time for a different class of animal altogether. One or more mommy flies had found the carcass in my chimney to be an inviting spot to build a maternity ward, what with all that smooshy meat for food and all, so they had dropped their eggs without stopping to think.. or whatever.. about how all those little baby flies were going to exit the chimney when the time came.

I vacuumed my house, top to bottom. I kept at it until I was sure I had found and sucked up every dead fly. There was easily a quart of them. I vacuumed out the fireplace and then sprayed it with a thick oily coat of both Bengal forever lasting roach spray and Raid pretty smelling but hardly fatal flying insect spray.

Still, the flies kept crawling out of my fireplace like tiny doughboys advancing across the fields of Flanders. They were coming out of the chimney the only way they could and running into a toxic cloud of gas of their own. I never did see another fly in the air, but I�ve been vacuuming up little baby flies for a week now. It�s a nightmare.

I�m watching carefully. If frogs start coming out next, I�m going back to church and asking to be re-baptized.

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