The Cleansing
I can’t place why this feels note-worthy much less blog-worthy, but neither can I get it out of my head. Maybe it’s the guilt. Maybe it speaks too curtly to my character that I laughed so loudly when I learned of the initiative. A program, they explained. More crudely put, a “cleansing.” You have to understand; my roommates explained to me, they don’t belong here. Violating our home, resting on our resources, draining our patience with every exponential influx. Nothing has stopped them and nothing will. We killed them, they explained. We killed them all.
Improbably, I am glad I wasn’t home for the genocide. In plastering myself at the bar on a Wednesday night, I successfully escaped the gleeful cackle (and it’s resulting guilt) that I surely would have issued had I witnessed the initiative first hand. However, I can tell you, with a certain amount of shame, blended with a certain amount of sick-triumph, that I danced on their graves when I returned.
More than 200 lady-bugs (pumpkin bugs actually, orange with fewer spots and a musky aroma) lost their lives on Wednesday, October 17. Eye-witness reports state that these bugs, while quietly going about their (flying-around and crawling-all-over-my-goddamn-stuff) lives were indiscriminately sucked into a household vacuum cleaner, clinging to each other in shock and fear, their (gross, hard, shiny) bodies gripping one-another. They were then dumped unceremoniously into a brown paper bag, which had previously held an Old-English 40-ouncer and was thus crumpled and stained with malt-liquor. The bag was then dragged into the yard, doused with a liberal amount of Bacardi 151, and set on fire. The bugs were burned alive, popping like knuckles, amid a raucous blast of drunken jeering; and then pissed out (a final fuck you) by a stream of booze-ridden urine. You can still see their carcasses, littering our backyard; Burned-black ladybug flesh, shells, legs, crackling like leaves in their Machiavellian death.
