In late August, I noticed mysterious red dots appearing on my skin. At first, it was just a couple around my ankles, so I figured that it was probably just mosquito bites.
After two weeks of accumulating red dots, my roommates were exposed to Covid. One tested positive and isolated herself, but the asymptomatic roommate carried on as usual. Not wanting to infect my coworkers or catch anything, I worked from home in my bedroom for two days, and the red dots multiplied until my legs looked diseased. Then came my cough.
Strangely, my positive Covid test didn’t affect me that much. It added an element of dread, but I mostly thought, “Okay, fine. I have Covid. But WHY AM I ITCHY?”
I went to the bathroom to look at my reddened throat when a black dot shot off my neck.
The possibility of fleas hadn’t even occurred to me, but the dot’s flight pattern looked so distinct. I stared at the dot hopping around our white sink.
Where on earth did it come from? I thought. We don’t have any pets.
Skeptical, I followed the internet’s advice and walked through my room in white socks as a diagnostic test. I inspected my socks in the bathroom, and a few had exposed themselves by jumping on the light fabric.
Idiots. They had stealth, but I had Google search.
Staring at my feverish face in the mirror, I realized I was a walking biohazard who couldn’t leave the house, trapping me with the fleas. The horror truly set in while I tried smashing, piercing, and drowning the flea in the sink, but it kept hopping around like I wasn’t even there. With my rage and temperature rising, I knew this meant one thing: war.
Over the next four days, I did everything I could to exorcize my house of the blood suckers. I bug-bombed my room twice; every moment I wasn’t working, I was cleaning; when I sat on the toilet, I researched ways to kill them; and I even wore flea-repellant dog collars around my ankles. The fleas were worthy foes, but they’d soon face the full force of my neuroticism.
Thankfully, my COVID symptoms were mild, primarily manifesting as a lack of appetite, but on the flip side, that meant that I was hardly sleeping, constantly working, and not eating. It only took a couple days for me until I knew that the fleas had the upper hand.
Despite their advantage, I learned that the fleas were mostly in my bedroom without making it to the rest of house, flea-repellant dog collars did nothing on humans, and most importantly, I learned that the fleas came to our yard—which meant that our landlord should pay for an exterminator.
Our landlord argued that killing the outdoor fleas would stop the indoor fleas, but her spraying the yard didn’t stop the indoor fleas from flea-ing. I begged her to pay for an exterminator, texting her, “I won’t know peace until I know that my enemies are actively dying.”
Our landlord thankfully agreed. The exterminators weren’t available for another three days, but that was a definite amount of time. We could survive another three days.
Meanwhile, my anxiety got bored and started finding new ways to entertain itself by narrating what the fleas could be thinking. When I walked around my house, I imagined the fleas wiping their mouths after their hearty meals, looking at the promised land in our carpet fibers, and saying, “Ah, sweet. Whee!” as they skydived onto the floor.
The afternoon the exterminator came, I waited by the door. I don’t know if that five-foot-two, balding man knew that he was my savior, but he may as well have been the second coming of Christ.
As he prepped his chemicals in the backseat of his Jeep, I asked some final questions, including, “Would fleas hop off of my Squishmellow and into my yarn basket? It’s like—a lot of yarn.”
Screwing in the head of his hose, he blinked and said, “No.” He looked up at me holding a ball of yarn a foot away from my body (fleas can jump thirteen inches max) and said, “That should be safe.”
I tucked the yarn into my purse, “Oh, this one I also beat pretty aggressively against the side of my tub, so they wouldn’t be in there anymore.”
He put his hose down and turned to me. “You know, I’ve been doing this twenty-seven years, and that’s a first for me.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
He laughed and went inside.
After he sprayed our house (and my yarn basket), my housemates and I didn’t see a single other flea. Through the power of industrial chemicals, the fleas were vanquished in four short hours.
The battle wasn’t without its costs: I counted how many bites I’d accumulated, and I found one hundred and forty-four. Now, I still panic every time I see a piece of lint on my socks, and I’m incapable of walking through our once-infected yard, but I’m happy to say that our house has been flea-free for three months. It’s over, and we won.
Ha!
Tiffany Kajiwara graduated from Calvin in 2022 with majors in literature and writing. Now, she continues to live in Grand Rapids and works at Baker Academic Publishing as a marketing assistant. In her free time, she enjoys crocheting, thrifting, and psychoanalyzing cartoon characters.
Oof, I feel your pain. I moved into a poorly-cleaned house last year, and the presence of my cat woke up a million slumbering flea eggs that had been embedded in the house’s cracks and crevices. The fleas were only interested in my cat and didn’t seem to bite me, but I spent weeks cleaning and obsessing over every scrap of dirt on the floor, convinced it was yet another flea carcass.
Oh no! Ugh, the paranoia is so real