Despite my elaborate set of snares, these atomic airborne devils keep appearing.
I vaguely remember sitting at a wobbly desk during a science class in the sixth grade and the teacher explained that some ancient thinkers believed in spontaneous generation. Aristotle wrote in On the Generation of Animals that flies and maggots could emerge from decaying matter in proper environmental conditions. The recipe for bees, “bugonia,” was to leave dead cattle lying about; bees would be born from the carcass. Theories of spontaneous generation had been tested: Scientists had supposedly put meat or fruit in a sealed container, then returned later to see find insects inside. Experiments like these led to the wrong conclusions, though, because the researchers had not sanitized or sterilized the food properly beforehand. In the modern era, the teacher said, we now understand that that life must come from life.
But I write to declare that I am certain spontaneous generation must be true because these soundless floating demons, so tiny that they almost evade detection from the human eye, keep appearing in my apartment. I open a cabinet in the kitchen, or twist the handle on the faucet, or lift the lid to the trash, and instantly five gnats begin hovering around me. Each day, I notice some little black dot in the air, then I realize that I have spotted a fruit fly rather than floating lint. The little black fleck on my counter is not a coffee grain that escaped its container, but instead a pest that has invaded my home.
Most people are mentally and emotionally stable enough to simply ignore these kitchen trespassers. After all, fruit flies don’t bite humans. The issue, though, is that I hate bugs. I just cannot psychologically function if there is a crawling or flying thing visible in my presence, and my brain just short-circuits. I try to do my job and type a sentence for National Review, but before I can land on a fitting verb, I think “THERE IS A BUG NEARBY.” To see an insect flying in my general direction evokes the same panic as staring at a massive asteroid plummeting directly at me. That whining buzz of a plump fly or zippy bee is translated in my mind as “DEATH DRONE IS ZOOMING TOWARDS YOU.” I am tempted to cloak myself in fundamentalist Islamic garb so that no insect can ever touch me. If I’m ever interrogated in Room 101, Winston’s rat mask will be refashioned to contain ants and spiders and flies instead.
A chunk of my paycheck has been devoted to pest control. I threw money at Amazon for a bulk order of mini fruit fly traps; each little plastic jar has a funnel that leads the tiny flies towards an alarmingly fluorescent liquid, and then they’re trapped inside. I plugged in an imposing bug lamp that attracts, then zaps, victims. I keep pouring an odorous death goo down all my drains to commit gnat genocide. I have followed my Nonna’s instructions and sacrificed some of my precious alcohol supply to concoct a rural Italian remedy: If you mix wine and liquid dish soap, the flies will be attracted to the wine, but the dish soap will coat their delicate wings, so they will drown unceremoniously.
My extermination methods have been effective: I sometimes hear the lamp go “POP,” and mini graveyards have accumulated at the bottoms of my liquid traps. And yet, despite my elaborate set of snares, these atomic airborne devils keep appearing. It is not possible that so much mating could occur each day. They must be products of spontaneous generation, and no textbook can convince me otherwise.