Pen or Sword - Life On My Own #3

By Sarah Einselen

I’m used to room­mates. My sis­ter and I shared a room for years, then I lived with a cou­ple of girls in col­lege. I con­sid­ered find­ing a room­mate for liv­ing on my own after col­lege, too, but it worked out that I didn’t need to. (It would have been very dif­fi­cult, anyway.)

So here I am, hap­pily liv­ing in my own apart­ment with­out a room­mate for the first time in… well I don’t know how long. And then some­one decides to move in.

A few some­ones, actu­ally. At least, they started out as only two or three. Now there must be fif­teen or twenty.

I think the banana peels started it. I love bananas, so I went through my bunch in maybe five days (had to be at least five on the bunch). I thought my kitchen trash can, with its reli­able Wal­Mart bag cov­ered by its fancy lit­tle foot-lever lid, would be able to keep the banana peels out of sight (and smell) until trash day.

I couldn’t smell the bananas, so I was happy. Until I found out some­one else could. They took up res­i­dence in the trash can, so I opened it one time and out they flew! The tiny lit­tle nui­sances that I can’t even swat, because they can zip right through the slats in the swatter.

Still, they mostly kept to their quar­ters in the banana peels in the bas­ket (on the floor in the kitchen in the apart­ment on the road in the town in the county… you get the idea). Trash day came and went, and the banana peels were long gone. I think they were replaced by bits of let­tuce that had started dying in my fridge. (Sin­gle peo­ple don’t eat enough let­tuce to get through an entire head, appar­ently. At least not this sin­gle per­son. I’m not that silly of a health nut.)

When I emp­tied the trash, I was care­ful to take the kitchen trash can out­side so any escap­ing foes would escape to the wide, wide world where my friendly spi­ders could feast. I even rinsed out the bot­tom of the trash can, pro­tected though it was by the Wal­Mart bag, because a fam­ily had taken up res­i­dence along the bot­tom. They were prob­a­bly killed in the eviction.

The house was rid of them!

I thought.

I saw a few above the kitchen sink.

Maybe not…

And today there were thir­teen lin­ing the edge of the wall above the cab­i­nets. No, I did not count them, but I am a reporter and thus I am prac­tic­ing my instant-head-count-guesstimate skills. The swat­ter came out and my neigh­bor above prob­a­bly wor­ried I was shoot­ing off a pel­let gun or some­thing, by the snap sounds con­stantly emit­ting from the kitchen.

Sounds emit­ted to no avail. I came home tonight, after a par­tic­u­larly strange set of hours at work, and found a num­ber of the foes par­ty­ing on the cor­ner of the wall and above the cab­i­nets again. Swap! Swap! I killed a few, but many more escaped, in what­ever cun­ning lit­tle fash­ion they could.

These room­mates are the worst I’ve ever had. I might have to hire an assassin.

The amanu­en­sis placed this in these nooks: life-on-my-owns

Posted by Sarah Einselen on Oct 18 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.