A while back I overheard a scratchy scuffling noise. A scratchy scuffling noise coming from inside my house's hot water cylinder cupboard.

The cupboard itself has a ton of insulation crammed inside. All kinds of squashy fluffy crap. Pink-bats, inflatable-doohickeys, runners-up in local druggie-aristocracy shootouts, you name it.

One of them was twitching. Its twitchy-bit was rat-sized, trapped and scuffling between fluffy insulation and its plastic wrapping. The trapped rat clawed its way to a minuscule hole, shoved its head out with affectionate twitchy whiskers, noticed me, then went berserk.

Its desire to flee to the horizon was hampered by being strangled by a stretchy plastic hole three millimetres wide. It thrashed, it ninja-backflipped, it battled its noose in a frantic attempt to free itself. I got the impression that if I'd approached closer, I'd give the poor creature a freakin' heart attack, so I maintained a reverent distance. But holy crap. If I'd known then what I know now, a mere heart attack mercy killing would have saved me a ton of trouble. That was my first mistake.

The rat freed itself then kapowed through the sound barrier in its bid for attic freedom. The heady novelty of encountering a rat wore off fast, accompanied by a smell of poo. Oh dear. A quick inspection detected quite a few rat droppings on the cupboard's floor. Oh yay. At least one rat had been defecating all willy-nilly[1] across our home, for some considerable time. Argh. Time to fight back.

I purchased several rat traps. Holy shit. Ever tried to bait one? I understand that the whole point of rat traps is to break a rat's neck, fair enough, but turns out springing one of these bad boys will karate-chop the through the goddamn sound barrier. And their sensitivity? They redefine "hair trigger". They go off if a pixie on Saturn burps. Baiting them without losing multiple fingers took hours.

At length I baited and set two: one under the kitchen sink, and one in the attic.

Accessing and arming the attic trap posed an extra problem. I own a fantastic ladder. I love it. It's glorious. It's extendable to five metres. Problem is, its minimum, unextended length is six metres. At least navigating it through the bends and nooks and crannies of my home's hallways makes it feel six metres. Or forty. You know the Moving Sofa problem? What's the largest-volume object you can squeeze around a right-angle turn on a corridor of unit width? My trusty bloated ladder tested that every day.

Manoeuvring the ladder to access the attic on a regular basis to check its rat trap for rotting rat corpses thus became a colossal pain in the ass. My trap-check frequency dropped from daily to ... er, less than daily. That was my second mistake.

The first public clue to my folly was the flies.

At first they were teensy-weensy flies. Just a few. But they persisted. And they multiplied. I might be working in my study and glance at the nearest window. Three flies would be skittering across it. I'd sigh, arm my fly swat, whack whack whack, get tissues, gather the fly corpses, wash hands, resume work, glance at the window ... and three more flies had arrived. Repeat indefinitely.

Now come on. It's summer. It's hot. You get flies. Just a few didn't arouse my suspicions. By the time I'd massacred Fly #107, though, at last I had to concede all was not rosy.

I'd not checked the attic trap for rat corpses for a fortnight. Crap. I facepalmed. The facepalm action squished seven more flies against my eyeballs.

That does it. This rodenty bullet must be bit. After much cursing and waggling and gougings of beautiful friggin' wallpaper, I scraped my vast ladder into position under the attic trapdoor.

It was vibrating.

I advanced vertically, clutching two cans of fly spray.

I opened my attic access.

A hideous buzzing tornado turkeyslapped me.

The resulting scene wasn't quite like that bit from The Matrix Revolutions where those gazillion gruesome squiddie-sentinel-critters gloop from that giant hole over Zion, but it wasn't far off. Holy shit.

I let rip with both cans. That was my third mistake.

You recall the execution of Saddam Hussein? And its news coverage? Ecstatic and celebrating Iraqis blammoed a million guns skyward then got curbstomped by a billion plummeting bullets. Same here. Fly sandstorm. These weren't genial and chubby flies, torpid on a feast of rotting rat. God no. We're talking hulking bluebottle bastards copping twin eyefuls of lethal poison. And sprayed flies go berserk. They kamikaze every window. They headbutt every wall. They scramjet swerving corkscrew arcs against every splattable surface. For multiple minutes, your home plays host to some squeamish Fly Pinball.

That's merely one fly. I'd just enraged thousands.

I'd just Hulk-Smashed this Matrix squiddie-gloop monstrosity into a seething shrapnel fly-bomb.

Remember that ridiculous movie Swordfish? One undeniable high point was that scene with the bank hostages rigged with C4-explosives and ball-bearings, "the world's largest walking claymore mines." The scene's explosion out-Matrix-ed The Matrix.

One such bastard thunderclapped against my face.

I spasmed, I recoiled, I sprang from the ladder and sought refuge against carpet. A thousand 'roided bluebottles exploded and bounced in all directions, shrieking like wanker banshees. A millisecond later, most accelerated through the sound barrier, popcorning my house and my eardrums with a monstrous rattle of sonic booms. The walls shredded like feta, the roof lifted a clear foot, kamikaze-fly flak blasts caught flocks of sparrows flying overhead and carved great avian lanes like demented shotguns, pylons got disembowelled, seismographs shattered, even a few nearby jets suffered what its pilots first reported as birdstrike.

At length the smoke cleared and the flies began perishing. My hallway looked like a dropkicked Stalingrad. Flies. So many dead and dying flies. They buzzed and gagged and waggled their legs in the air and spun like Catherine wheels and at last fell silent.

At length I shovelled several hundred off me, then ventured back up the ladder and inspected the attic rat trap. Good lord. I'd expected a deceased rat. But only fur remained. The rat's entire biomass had been converted to flies.

Vacuuming and cleanup took hours, accompanied by quite a lot of showering. And you'd better believe I vowed never again to neglect daily checking of one's rat traps.

[1] If you've never tried to defecate "all willy-nilly", you really should.

Original: https://mikeyclarke.co.nz/blog/2026/2/for-gods-sak...