I sat around my new apartment, in my new city, sick and out of work. Killing flies was the only thing that gave me a modicum of satisfaction. My girlfriend was in Manhattan working. My roommates were too. My laptop sat at a jaunty angle on the couch, its screen in a dim power save mode, betrayed a cheesy career aptitude test website. Then I caught a fly with my bare hands-crippled it, but not killed. A light flicked on in my NyQuil soaked brain-feed this fly to the turtles!
Our place had been plagued by these fucking flies for the past 4 days- at exactly the time I quit my shitty bike shop job and got this shitty cold. My spirits weren’t too low though, all things considered. I had only just impulsively uprooted my little life in California, driven 3000 miles in an undead zombie pickup truck, spent a week on a friend’s couch and gotten a job at a “high profile” bicycle shop. This really proved to be the first quality time I ‘d had to sit around and take stock of it all, in my own place, with the houseflies, of course.
I had spent the last couple of sick days reading up on various remedies for this problem. People suggested everything from homemade flypaper which I tried to make before realizing that we only had light corn syrup- which actually contained no high fructose corn syrup at all and therefore didn’t catch shit- to essential oils that were purported to make the flies so uncomfortable that they would decide to leave our apartment. In the end, a trip to the hardware store yielding one bright green fly swatter, and a dude with nothing better to do proved a lethal combination for the flies.
My roommate Mindy bought these two turtles impulsively in Chinatown about a month ago. According to Mindy, the old lady hawking them intimated, through cruel gestures, and aggravated English, that if they weren’t purchased as pets, they’d end up in someone’s soup. At first I thought having turtles around would be great. We could name them Leonardo and Donatello and they’d be rad, but then she named them Walter and Bosco or something like that—cute, boring and I started to lose interest. I remembered something from youth: My mom issuing a stringent warning about playing with Tony Lopez’s turtles.
"Turtles carry salmonella, you cannot, under any circumstances, touch them and forget to wash your hands"
Why not mom? What’ll happen if I forget?
"You’ll get salmonella poisoning."
What’s that do?
"If you’re old, it can kill you…remember what happened to your abuelita?"
My grandmother had once handled some bad chicken and not washed her hands properly. She nearly died.
My mom was very good at tactically using vagaries of speech with just enough of a scientific sprinkling to turn my brothers and I into germaphobes for life. Anyway, I scooped the immobilized fly up with a napkin, and carefully dropped it into the tank and waited to see what would happen.
When we first got the turtles, Fofa, my other roommate, Rachelle’s mentally unstable dog must have somehow dragged a slug into the house. Rachelle immediately saw to the turtles’ needs and dropped said slug into the tank, placing it on a patch of dry land. The slug passively explored its new surroundings and slid mindlessly into the water. What we witnessed next astounded both of us. As the slug sank slowly, almost gracefully down through the cool water, these two little turtles-some breed of Slider, no bigger than a silver dollar at the time and scared to death of the massive faces peering at them through the aquarium glass, turned into savage carnivores. We watched, mouths agape, as the turtles took pass after pass at the hapless slug, now sunk to the bottom of the tank and oozing a viscous white material. Within minutes there was no evidence of the slug’s existence.
So I dropped the fly into the tank and and eagerly waited for the bloodsport to begin. One of the turtles, the braver of the two, Walter, I think, poked his head above the water to get a better look at the wriggling spectacle on the surface. He almost bumped the fly with his deadly beak as he came to the surface. I could hardly contain my excitement. But something was different this time. Walter showed no interest. The fly floated haplessly on the current and the other turtle just did what he always did when a human approached the tank; paddled frantically and futilely against the rear glass of the aquarium. I was very disappointed. Maybe the turtles weren’t hungry, or maybe their palates had become too refined for the common Brooklyn house fly. Either way, my great entertainment for the afternoon was a bust.