That Feeling You Get When You Leave Your Window Open At Night

It is one of those long, hot, sleepless nights in the middle of August. The kind where you feel like the sun is still up and with no AC it feels like it might just be inside your bedroom. It is one of those nights where you feel like you have to open your window the one with no screen, you know, because the fan is simply not cutting it. You know that there are bugs out there, but at this point who cares? Right?

So, you open the window. It feels so nice for the first few minutes that you actually start to drift back to blissful darkness when you feel the patter of tiny feet on the back of your neck. You slap the infernal insect away before its proboscis can pierce your skin and you feel that you have won this battle. The cool outside air and the breeze provided by the open window are so relaxing that you figure a night of battling with bugs is better than restless tossing and turning.

There you are, just about to relax again when you hear the lazy buzzing of a fat and winged beast floating in on the wind. You brandish your fly swatter like it’s a sword straight from the scabbard of King Arthur himself and you dash your foe upon the rocks, taking its puny life. You feel like Beowulf, champion of the people, and knowing that you have just brought peace to your kingdom you return to your pillow, exhausted and ready to enter into a sleep almost as deep as that of the fly you have just slain.

Just as the last drop of wakefulness is about to leave your mind you feel The Presence of some infernal beast. Your eyes dart to the wall just under the window. It stares down at you with too many eyes as it lays there perched on too many legs, waiting for its opportunity to strike. Leaping from under the covers you once more lunge for your weapon. You square off against your foe, nearly as nude as the beast itself and begin to exchange rapid blows. The spider is too quick however, and it eventually scampers into that corner, you know the one, you can’t quite reach it without stepping down from the bed, and so you decide to call it a draw and go back to sleep.

Now, it’s quite nearly two o’clock in the morning, and you decide that no foe will keep you up any longer, after all, you have that meeting in the morning and you absolutely cannot be late, not after last time. You shudder to think of what Janice from accounting will think if you have to scamper in there with your tie half done up and your coffee spilling all over your sleeve. Those judgmental looks are just not going to be welcomed, not again, especially after a long and hot night like tonight.

Your eyes once again start to drift closed, thoughts of the sneers of your colleagues compelling you to sleep when you hear the sound of insectile feet scampering across your bedsheets. Oh no, you think, you are not going to take me like this, and you snap your eyes open just in time to see the many legged battle tank making its charge right for your pillow. The nasty creature has claws like iron and so many legs that you couldn’t count them all, even if you had somehow managed to graduate Kindergarten. You naturally squeal like a small child and slam the first blunt object you can reach into the earwig over and over again until you are certain there is nothing more than a nasty smear left of your foe.

You look down at your bludgeon and read the somewhat smudged over numbers as 3:28. At this point you are resigned to a sleepless night, but a night of such terrors is simply not worth it to have a minute amount of added comfort. You slide the window shut and the lock snaps into place with a resonant click. You settle into your once again sweltering bed and resign yourself to the rest of the night night spent sweatily tossing and turning.

Keeping your head far away from the new smudge on your otherwise somewhat clean sheets you lay down to rest once again. When sleep finally and reluctantly takes you the only dreams you can dream are tainted with images of nasty vermin crawling all over your bed, you feel smothered and oppressed by the thousands of tiny insect bodies that are pressed upon you… You jerk awake. The final echoing call of the horn of battle has sounded. You grudgingly press the snooze button and flop back down to stare out the window into the faint light of dawn. At this point the nine additional minutes of sleep are all you have left to hope for before you have to have a long and tired day at work.

What you see is enough to scare the hooves off a bull and you leap from your bed. Thousands of insects are perched across your window, clawing and scrambling to get in. You realize that the tapping you heard on your window was not, in fact, the tree that often plagues your sleep, but several Goliath Beetles wielding together nearly an entire stick which they are slamming repeatedly into the window. A crack is formed and is starting to widen.

You raise your trusty, and at this point somewhat disgusting flyswatter and take a battle stance. If you are going to go down you aren’t going to do so without a fight.

Bang!

Bang!

Bang!

The crack widens and ants begin to pour through. You are laying about yourself with the swatter and meting out unmeasured destruction upon your enemies. 

Unwittingly you are also helping them and with one final smash the shards of the window crash inward, carrying all the hosts of damnation itself upon their backs. 

You stand no chance, but you are now getting rapidly surrounded and realize that hope is lost. 

You have taking hundreds, if not thousands of their lives, but at what cost? 

Their hosts are endless and you are but one.

The inevitable happens. 

You fall. 

The last thing your darkening vision sees is that spider. You make eye to eye to eye to eye to eye contact with the nasty creature and the world fades to darkness, all you can see is the smug look on the face of that tiny turd blossom.

***

Two days later the day starts for detective Jones with a missing persons case on his desk. The first place he naturally checks is your apartment. You’ve been gone for two days and your friends and family got worried. He kicks the door down and walks in with cautious steps. He steps through the door to your room and sees an unusual sight.

There are shards of glass all over the bed and obvious signs of a struggle. There is a grimy flyswatter laying on the bed, and the room is otherwise empty. It must have been a kidnapping he thinks as he takes out his note pad and takes his notes. He begins to leave once his report is finished, jumping slightly when he notices the spider that has established quite a nest in the corner of the room. There is no sign of you, and there never will be.

There are fruit flies on the bananas.