So, this isn’t about serial killers like I promised last week. It involves a mass killing of small organisms though.

In my very first post on this blog, I mentioned my two-year stint of living with the Worst Roommates Ever, as though it was a big deal. Big enough for me to mention among various other life events in my attempt to make myself seem interesting. But I must’ve been grasping at straws – it couldn’t have been that bad, right?

Well, now that I am completely moved out of that hovel, and am feeling a little spicy, I’ve decided its time for a tell-all. Even though I’m pretty sure the only people reading this blog have already heard these stories in person.

T and L, as we’ll call them, were a couple who sought roommates in 2016, and I had just gotten accepted into an MFA program in the same city. The apartment was close to campus. Good. It was furnished. Great—who the fuck wants to lug furniture from southern New Mexico to Minnesota?—so I signed.

The apartment smelled when I arrived, and every cabinet was full of T and L’s stuff already, I had to ask for half a cabinet. I realized within a few days that the pungent smell was from their cooking full dinners at 10 o’clock at night—I don’t know the dishes exactly, but they apparently required enough red onions to bother my eyes all the way from my bedroom—and proceeding to leave them out al night, put them in the fridge, and then eventually throw the remaining food away because they always made too much.

I just want to mention that we had a working garbage disposal but T, the girlfriend, regularly poured leftover soup into the garbage bag that was already full to bursting. And they never took it out – I did when I couldn’t take it anymore, and I suppose that made them think it was my job.

I don’t know what they thought their jobs were to this day.

Other grievances arose – they invited their friends over late on weeknights, where they regularly woke me up from how loud they were giggling and aggressively playing Uno. I was working at Walmart at the time and was suffering serious imposter syndrome so sometimes, with my mind clouded by sleep, I would consider what I had to lose if I got arrested for doing stuff like throwing their potted plants off the balcony.

I came back from a trip one summer to dozens of fully intact fish in the freezer. L liked fishing, but neither he nor his girlfriend liked eating fish. While trying to figure out if I should try and teach a grown man the concept of catch-and-release, they eventually tossed the fish, because apparently they didn’t know you had to gut them before you could put them in the freezer.

Also they once kept on defrosting in the sink and I screamed when I came home almost wasted to find fucking Billy Bass’ dead-eyed stare.

But the maggot incident. That was what made me nearly hurl myself over the balcony.

If you weren’t already aware, know that Minnesota summers are notably bug-heavy, as are most summers everywhere else. But it’s also gross and humid, so it’s somehow worse.

I don’t know how to deep dive into this, so I’m just going to throw a simple equation at you:

humid summer + leaving the porch door open + throwing your rotting food in the garbage = ?

Add in the variable of the only roommate who ever takes out the garbage not taking out the garbage because it’s very heavy and you kids need to learn, and you get three bags of piled garbage in the kitchen. I get sick of the stalemate and pick up one of the bags, leaking some kind of concoction from the top, and what I think are grains of rice are disturbed and fall to the ground.

They were…not grains of rice. And they were everywhere.

I’d started some kind of revolution. We went from not knowing of our little maggot nest to them crawling up the walls, across the kitchen, toward our rooms. I tried everything the internet said – salt. Bleach. I wanted to pour hot water on them but was worried what it may do to the floor. I called maintenance and got quite the lecture for that, for reasons I still can’t fucking comprehend:

(yeah I was little heated but in my defense, what the fuck)

I was scraping them off the wall with an expired AAA card, stepping on as many as I could – I almost accidentally create toxic fumes because in my desperation I nearly added an ammonia-based cleaner to the kitchen floor I’d already reduced to a puddle of bleach and water. They were climbing up the handle of the mop. I was ready to fucking die.

After a day of joining forces to fix a problem they caused and I unknowingly contributed to, I managed to get to sleep. A few weeks later, spraying the dozens of surviving flies right out of the air with Raid became almost a fun game. The circle of life is fascinating.

It was complaining loudly about this horror show that got me in the room in which I am writing this blog post. No one thought I deserved to live like that, even if they suspected I was exaggerating. I guess this is the part where I turn around and thank the maggots for giving me a new lease on life but fuck you that not how this ends. Fuck those tiny squirmy bastards, I’d kill you all again if I could.

G’night.