Roger Federov looked at his bedroom window with disgust. The large bay window facing Lake Erie was coated in a thick layer of mayflies, their huddled bodies breaking up the clear blue sky beyond. When he and his wife first saw this bedroom, she called it a million-dollar view, a sentiment the realtor agreed with. Now he didn’t feel like he was getting his money’s worth. Smelling breakfast Roger climbed out of bed to face the morning.
His wife Alice was setting the breakfast table. “The breakfast sausage you bought smells funny,” she cautioned. “It’s not breakfast sausage. It’s Doctor’s Sausage. Doktorskaya. My Dad loved it.” He looked at the crisped edges of the sliced loaf with disappointment. “I usually eat it cold.”
The package he was expecting had come after he went to bed last night, and the doorbell camera showed it remained where they left it. Roger took the bug spray off the credenza, swung open the front door with his right hand while he sprayed with his left. A cloud of mayflies that had been resting on the door blew up like a cloud of dust, the bug spray repelling them just long enough for Roger to grab the package and quickly shut the door. Then he sprayed the box itself on all sides as the remaining insects dropped off. “It’s a real pain keeping these things outside!”
“How bad are the neighbors this morning?” asked his wife from the breakfast nook. Roger peered out the living room window and gasped. The house on the other side of the street appeared fine, but the house next door…
“Jesus, honey. Come look at this.” A clang of silver on porcelain answered him. “I’m eating,” she called back through chewing. Roger came into the breakfast nook and sat down. His plate was missing half its eggs and had a double helping of fried sausage. His chewing wife smiled and winked at him. He wasn’t crazy about eggs anyway.
“Are you going into the office today?” she asked? Roger took a bite of the crispy soft sausage and winced. “No. The idiots are at it again.” Alice made her ‘aww, too bad’ face. “Virtual meeting it is. Nothing important going on. Normal shit.” Roger put down the fork and picked up the knife, he would have marmalade toast for breakfast. “You can still get out if you want,” he continued. “There’s always something happening downtown.”
Alice Federov shook her head. “Not up to traffic. Just want to be outside.” Roger appeared thoughtful. “You could always just go down to the beach.” Alice stared at him. He’d forgotten.
His property sat right on the lake front, and he was gradually losing his investment to time. Thirty years ago, the land beyond the chain link fence was a city park and was wide enough so they could put benches down and relax in the shade. Now the crooked tree clung to life almost horizontally and the chain link fence was drooping down the cliff towards the churning water below. The incredible shrinking backyard. The city had put a nice new stairwell down to the beach years ago. Now it was a free-standing structure, leaning away from the cliff, its cracked cement pylons revealing the warped rebar beneath. So much for walking distance.
Roger finished his toast and took his plate to the counter. “Whatever you decide to do today, don’t let anymore of those bugs in, please.” He refilled his coffee and then ascended the spiral staircase to his office. “I was up half the night getting them off our living room ceiling.”
She yelled something up after him, but he didn’t hear it. Those goddamn demonstrators were an embarrassment, and that made them a threat. He powered up his computer and opened the curtains. Yuck. He closed the curtains and turned on the lamp on his desk. This side of the house was always worse than the others, for some reason.
The virtual meeting did little to calm his nerves. Roger Federov was a partner, but a junior partner. His income was passive and dependent on what the managing partners decided. What they had decided was to rebrand their produce to give the vendors better cover. McDowell Agsciences would sell under its Upmarket Provisions label. “Only our vendors know it’s us,” assured Dane Heliot. Dane was a 6’7” giant with a booming voice and a vice grip. People called him ‘Great Dane.’ To himself, Roger called him ‘Mediocre Dane.’
Earlier in spring the weather had been particularly rainy and the runoff from their operations had made a larger than usual footprint in Lake Erie’s biome. The rats on the local news were yelling that summer swimming would be ruined, fishing would be poor, and the mayflies would have a wasted generation that year. To that last point Roger had news for them.
‘Mediocre’ Dan laughed off questions about the city or tourism industry coming after them for money. “No chance. They need an active investigation from the environmental authorities or else they have no case.” Dane smirked. “There is no active investigation, nor will there be.” The others laughed. They could afford not to declare profits for a few years. Roger Federov could not.
He was the first man in his family to graduate college and was the last to ever work in overalls. Roger had gone to an agricultural school in an agricultural area, but he didn’t want to be a farmer. He wanted to be a farm owner, and now he technically was. Three years after his own father left him their hundred-acre farm he folded it into a conglomerate one of his old college buddies had put together with foreign investment. Roger’s place within that conglomerate had shrunk relative to others as the conglomerate itself had only grown.
Alice shrieked down in the garage. Roger turned off his camera and turned on his auto-mouse. He went downstairs as she ran up, they met in the middle.
“Those things bite!” Alice rubbed her arms as if shivering, despite the summer warmth. Roger did his best to appear compassionate. “People feel itchy around the mayflies, it’s normal,” he soothed. “But it’s a fact that when it happens to people, it happens all in their mind.” Alice sneered at him. “This doesn’t itch! It burns!” Her arms were covered in red dots. Roger felt confused, perhaps she was allergic? “Hives, babe. All in your head.” Alice frowned and marched back downstairs. “They’re getting streaks on our car too!”
Roger laughed. He knew that he married a trophy wife who had more boob than brain, but even she had to know bug guts got splattered on cars, even luxury cars, in early summer. Attention. Always wanting attention. Roger returned to his office and turned his camera back just in time. “You there, Roger?” ‘Passable’ Dane laughed awkwardly in his best not-shaming-just-joking voice. “Yep. Sorry, we’re under siege from all these non-existent mayflies we supposedly killed.” Roger tilted the camera to his window and threw open the curtains. A woman groaned, a few others hushed. Roger turned to the window and his jaw dropped open. His office window was nearly blanketed from end to end with the little critters.
“We see you’ve got bigger problems than noisy demonstrators,” ‘Middling’ Dane cackled. Roger shut the curtains again and sat down. The meeting ended only minutes later. No promise from their insurers that their rates wouldn’t go up. No assurance from managing partners that they wouldn’t change their accounting to hide profits. Roger exhaled. He might have to actually go out and work until this blew over.
He heard Alice in the shower now, probably horrified that a winged insect had touched her. Roger came downstairs and peered out the living room window again. His neighbor, a prominent local businessman who came from old steel money, was nowhere outside. His beautiful home was now entirely covered in bustling shivering insects. They clung to the house like drapes. Roger had never seen anything like it. One year the mayflies had been so bad the city needed to bring out streetsweepers to clear the roads. But they never stuck to houses like this, never in the thirty years that he lived at this address.
Roger tore open the package he’d received and dug out a puffy plastic bag. “All that packaging for one little plastic coupling,” he said aloud. Earlier that year he cracked the coupling on his pressure washer while clearing off the driveway of the sludge left over from the melted snow. Now he was back in business. “Let’s do a little spring cleaning,” he laughed to himself. “Summer cleaning.”
His father had raised him with pride, as his own father had raised him before. Their long-dead patriarch fled the old country after losing the family farm to collectivization efforts there. Through hard work and determination, he returned his family to farming on a new land in a new country. Grigory Federov died leaving his son Andriy a hundred acres, and Andriy died leaving Roger the same inheritance. “Owning the land you work is freedom,” his grandfather told him as a boy. “Any communist who tries to take your land is taking away your whole life.”
Roger was a firm anti-communist; his land was making him money while others worked it. Under capitalism he had real freedom, freedom pinkos like the people demonstrating at the office were desperate to take from him. Roger Federov wasn’t no runner, he was a fighter. But before he would deal with the pests at his office, he would deal with the pests on his home. The metal down spouting clamored in a low metallic roar, large chunks of mayflies breaking off the windows and more mayflies taking their place. It sounded like a hailstorm outside. Roger rolled the plastic coupling in his fingers. He was going to enjoy this.
Carrying the pressure washer outside through the covered back porch he assembled everything and attached the hose. He stood far enough back in his remaining back yard to see the extent of the madness happening outside. The façade and roof were visible in places, but it was shaping up to look like his next-door neighbors. A low-pressure stream bubbled out the end of his pressure washer, a burning sting attacked the back of his neck. “Yeowch!” A tiny broken mayfly was squished on the palm of his hand. The spot burned. “Damn spiders,” he hissed.
He squeezed the trigger, and a high-pressure column of water assailed the side of his home. “Take that!” Roger laughed maniacally as he started at the top of the house and worked side to side and top to bottom. Surprised mayflies let go of the house to hang in midair; the powerful jet stream blasting them back into the siding and onto the ground. Beneath the sound of the water a crackling sound emerged. Whole chunks fell to the ground, Roger wondered just how thickly they were piled on.
Alice screamed from inside the house. She probably found some mayflies in the bathroom or something. Roger slowly circled the house as the wind blew in from the lake. He wondered how there could be so many mayflies with the wind this high. Chunks of bug debris flew everywhere as he finished the side and moved to the face of the building. The tulips were in full bloom, but Roger was too into what he was doing, he mowed them all down with water to kill off the surviving insects hovering above the ground. Roger didn’t win in life by working hard, he won in life by working smart.
Now the side of the garage, the garage door opened. He saw their luxury car parked safely in its place, save for all the bugs covering it. Roger felt another sting, worse this time. The bite on his neck was beginning to swell. Roger directed the stream onto the car, sending the delicate beings against the far wall. Water trickled out towards his feet. For a moment it looked discolored.
He was saving the best for last. The great bay window that gave his lake facing bedroom its million-dollar view would be his last stand. Alice was standing in the kitchen window wrapped in a towel, tapping the glass and yelling something. Roger sprayed the kitchen window, and she jumped back with a start. Funny lady.
When he finally made it back to his bay window, he saw Alice running into their bedroom. She stood facing him with legs apart and stuck out her arm; palm facing Roger. He just saw her shake her head before the powerful force of water washed over the window, taking all the mayflies off with it.
Alice stood drenched, screaming at him to stop. Their bedroom looked soaked. A glass panel dropped out of its frame and shattered on the ground. Roger cut off the water. The façade of his home was pitted and crumbling. He’d just pressure washed the exterior of his house during the preceding fall. “What in the hell?!” Her face, legs and arms were covered in savage blisters. A spot on his own arm was blistering too. Then a deafening roar as the next-door neighbor’s house collapsed on itself, a Biblical swarm of mayflies rising off the wreckage. The house across the street remained bug free.
Roger and Alice Federov jumped into what was left of their luxury car and fled.
— Hollis Black writes fiction and creative non-fiction from the Midwest. They live near water.