Longing for a No Fly Zone

You know the way salmon always return to the same stream where they were born and fight their way

back up it to spawn and die? Well, instead of salmon think of flies and instead of a fresh, rushing stream think of my apartment.  I am living in the midst of a mass return and die off of flies. It is as gross as it sounds.
When we came to view the apartment as a possible rental for us in January there were dead flies everywhere, hanging from fly strips, on the floors and windowsills, behind closed blinds on the skylights. Many, many flies. The apartment had been empty for a while and my first thought was that perhaps the previous tenants had died in the apartment and their bodies had not been discovered for days. Hey, it happens, but I think the rental manager has to disclose that. She wasn't offering up any tales of dead bodies so I chose not to bring it up but a couple of  small but highly suspicious stains on the bedroom carpet kept the thought firmly in my mind. Trying to see through the fly issue, we agreed to rent the apartment as long as the management cleaned up the flies and checked for any sources such as dead rodents and the like.  An exterminator came and gave the space a thumbs up, no rodents, no human corpses in the walls and so the cleaners came in and did their job. There was a bit of an ongoing dead fly clean up after moving in but I dealt with it, having been assured it was a one time thing.

Fall has now  arrived and with it a wave of dopey, slow moving flies. They fly around the windows outside, banging and banging into the glass or just crawl slowly across the panes. Up to four at a time get trapped between the screens and the closed windows, seemingly desperate to get inside. I avoid opening those windows. They find their way in from who knows where and buzz in the corners of windows searching for a way out. I have killed a dozen and vacuumed up double that amount and that's just this week. Twice a fly has bombed into my head as I sat reading. It's as if they are on their last legs, having lost all sense of direction or ability to manoeuvre. They just seem to know they need to be back in our apartment... to die. There is a particular corner of the living room that seems to be the final rest stop and requires my constant vigilance to keep the bodies from piling up. I keep several fly swatters around the apartment and the insides of the windows are smeared with the aftermath of my attacks. It is a particular type of torment, walking into a room to do something and having that sound, that intermittent buzz and tap of a big, fat fly noodling around a window frame, assault me.  It doesn't last long when I have a swatter in hand.

Making a mountain out of a molehill, you say? Perhaps, but I have lived in many different homes, some of which did have dead animal carcasses under the porch or in the crawlspace and I have never experienced a fly-festation as this. The common house fly is known as a filth fly (think about THAT) and "depending on species, they may seek moist, dark piles of trash, rotting carcasses or manure in which to lay their eggs." That comes straight off the Orkin.com pest control website and does NOT instill a sense of total confidence in me that I do not not have rotting corpses, human or animal in my walls. Or manure. My house is clean, there are no teenagers leaving food to rot under the bed. No compost bucket left to moulder on the counter, I'm pretty tidy. So all I can do now is stand ready, swatter and vacuum poised, to break the cycle of life for the fly kingdom which has decided to come back home, and let them know who lives here now....and hope that the previous tenants really did move out.