Theresa Lewis

Flies are annoying little creatures that usually end up on your food, or flying in your face and tickling your nose when you are trying to sleep. When your hands are otherwise occupied, the flies will land somewhere on your skin and drive you mental. In my opinion, unless you are a forensic pathologist, or a detective, flies are nothing more than a scourge upon the earth, sent here to test our sanity.

All my life, I have been on a quest for a better fly swatter. I have used rolled up newspapers, or magazines, but they usually leave an ink smear on light colored walls. I have used pieces of inner tube nailed to a stick. That was one of the nastiest swatters I have ever used. You cannot swat a fly on a person’s anatomy with the inner tube swatter because it hurts like the dickens and leaves a welt. It was good for snatching flies out of the air though.

The traditional swatter is not at all reliable. I know this for a fact. I used to have a prized African violet plant that I truly loved. I nurtured that plant for years and had grown it from a tiny slip of a thing to the dinner plate size it was. It was my pride and joy.

One day as I was washing the kitchen floor, there was a huge blue bottle fly that tormented me the whole time I worked. It was a dozy fly, one of the first of the season. With the whole house to fly around in, it chose to buzz in my ears and constantly fly in my face. I barely tolerated it for a good hour until I finished washing the floor on my hands and knees. Now, my blood was boiling and I had murder on my mind.

I put away all my cleaning products and went on a search to find my tormentor. I had a plan for it and it wasn’t going to be pretty. While I was working, it was constantly in my face. Now that I was finished, I couldn’t find it anywhere. The more time that passed, the stronger my resolve became that I was going to get that sucker.

After searching every room in the house, I went back to the kitchen. My blood was boiling and my heart was racing at that point. I was really angry. I finally spotted the fly behind the sheers on the patio door.

I vented out loud at the fly out of frustration. I berated it in a barrage of fierce,  nasty and vulgar words. Slowly, I opened the sheers to expose my tormentor. The fly didn’t move. With swatter in hand, I raised my arm to serve justice on the critter. I did a mighty swing. I missed the fly, but the flapper detached itself from the handle and shot forward with a precision I could never have imagined and it sliced my precious African violet in two. I was devastated.

Heartbroken over the destruction of my beautiful plant, I worked at re-attaching the flapper to the handle. Once I got it on, I used a piece of string threaded several times through the holes on the flapper to secure it. Now, I was on a search and destroy mission. The fly was back on the patio door, just waiting for me to take a swipe at it again. It taunted me until I was almost insane from anger. It kept flying around and bouncing off the door and bouncing off my face.

I figured the best way to catch it was to stand still and close and wait for the fly to calm down. I was trying to outsmart the fly. It worked. I hit that sucker with all my might. Unfortunately, fly body parts and juice squirted through the holes in the flapper and sprayed me in the face. The fly was definitely dead, but now I wanted to cut my head off. I was so repulsed. I told myself that next time I should not stand so close to my intended target.

I watched an ad on television for a fly swatter that was quite interesting. It was a spring loaded gun with a perforated flapper that had a string that attached the flapper to the gun so when you shot a fly from a distance of approximately two feet, you didn’t have to get up and retrieve the business end of the contraption. All you had to do was pull it back by the string. That too, was a fun instrument to use, but it was awfully messy because of the holes on the flapper. I don’t think we were meant to smack a fly with the kind of force that could damage ornaments on a table. It often left a spray of fly body parts that floated through the air like a mist. You were hard pressed to find any remnants of the corpses after a blast from that thing.

My next fly swatter was an electric one that came with a tiny whisk to remove the dead bodies from the swatter. It was bright yellow and it was battery operated. It wasn’t necessary to hit a fly with much force because as soon as the fly touched the flapper end, it got a shock and I think it died from fright. It was a fun instrument to use, not too effective on the flies, but we had great fun shocking each other’s elbows, or in my dad’s case, his bald head. We would sneak up on one another and shock the wits out of each other. I really enjoyed the fun of it, but somehow, one day it just disappeared. I think my dad disposed of it. I know it was making him cranky.

I am still on a mission to find the ultimate fly swatter.