“You kill one,” said the old man from his wheelchair, “and ten more will come to the funeral.”

This was not a mob boss plotting to get his enemies into a confined space. Rather, it was my dear old Daddy discussing houseflies with his daughter, who was looking for more and better ways to kill them.

So much to unpack. I have rambled on at some length about my live-and-let-live approach to scary creatures, so why the about-face regarding flies? I think it might be that flies are just so stupid and aimless. I mean, creatures like spiders, snakes, and leopards generally have somewhere to be, right? Not so the flies. Imagine, if you will, coming downstairs one morning to find a bunch of spiders marching aimlessly in circles around the kitchen floor, bumping into each other, without any sort of overarching mission. Were this to happen in my house, there might be a great paradigm shift in my dealing with said spiders.

So, flies are idiots, and they have to go. But how? Let’s look at some of the prevailing themes.

Primal: Scream at the flies and try to chase them outside. Sic your cat on them.

Passive: Get some fly paper, or fly strips, of fly tape, and hang it in your kitchen. Occasionally, one of these fools will blunder into it and that will be all she wrote. The dead flies sticking to the paper are marginally less gross than the live ones wandering around. This stuff collects flies, for sure, but the jury is out as to whether it actually reduces the number of flies that are doing their circling thing at any given moment. See my father’s above comment about the funeral.

Low-tech: I refer here the time-tested flyswatter. I am reminded of a story about my sister Mary as a toddler. She and my father entered the kitchen on some errand or other, and Mary noticed a fly (probably one among about a million, but I digress). She stared at it intently, and cried out, “A sy! A sy!”

Then, she stuck her hand out and added, “sy-sotter, sy-sotter!”

My father obligingly placed a fly swatter in her hand. She stood for a few seconds, holding the flyswatter tightly and staring intently at the fly. Then she handed the swatter back to my father and said, “zoo sop it!” That fly may well have lived to bumble around like a moron for a while longer.

High tech: Get yourself a device that I like to call the “lethal tennis racket.” You swing the racket, and if you are fortunate enough to hit a fly, a little battery-powered electric zap will take it out immediately. It’s harder than you think to hit them, though. Maybe they are smarter than I think they are, because they are good at dodging even while giving the impression that they have no idea what is going on.

Strangely hilarious: This is one of my father’s stories; where he heard it, I can’t imagine. Try to picture his gleeful expression and gloating voice as he tells it. To wit: to take out a particular fly, you must channel your inner mob boss, and build a device that will cause said fly to suffer a fatal fall. First, get a block of mahogany (very hard wood). Put this block on your table and build a tiny, three-part ladder (popsicle sticks?) that goes straight up at one end, then straight across, and then straight down on the other end. Like this:

You have to make sure that your vertical ladders are tall enough for the plummeting fly to attain lethal velocity. Then, you put this apparatus down in front of the fly and watch while it, innocently unaware of the danger, starts up the first vertical ladder. (Why does the fly decide to climb the ladder? Who knows what a fly is thinking? Anyway, it’s a vital plot point.) You lean closer and rub your hands together wickedly as the hapless creature starts across the horizontal portion. Aha! The fly doesn’t notice that you have cleverly left a rung missing! It falls through the resulting gap and “crashes to its death on the solid mahogany block below.” Gotcha!

Next steps: I recently noticed that, even though I have three or four fly strips hanging in my kitchen, most of the flies do their aimless circling at a lower elevation. Maybe I need to get the fly strip down there to their level? I spent some time constructing a rudimentary pulley system, by which the fly strip can be lowered and raised at will. I plan to leave the strip down near the floor tonight and see if I can get a bonanza.

I’ll let you know.