Install an air conditioner for the first time ever. New England’s homes are not built for its summers, hotter and more humid than they are given credit for, and priority goes to keeping warm through its rightfully feared winters. New Englanders are also not built for their summers. You do not know how to install an air conditioner, and you will do it poorly.
It will sit awkwardly in the window frame, and it will leave openings. Cover these openings with copious layers of duct tape. This will look ugly and prove largely ineffective, but the idea of foam insulation, or in fact any measure better than duct tape, will not occur to you. You will think you have patched every hole there could possibly be. You will be wrong. Every night the lamplight that shines through your bedroom window until long after midnight will attract the winged denizens of the heavy forest which encircles your home. You will repeatedly scan the duct tape for holes, and you will always find them.
You bear no more than the average revulsion to insects, or, at least, you didn’t used to. Quickly they will drive you to the brink of a kind of panicked insanity that you have not known before. You will develop a case of entomophobia you have yet to shake. In the mornings you will find the bodies of moths crushed into your carpet. Years later, sometimes you will still find them, no matter how many times you have vacuumed.
You will come to understand with newfound appreciation why insects made up three of the ten plagues.
Quickly abandon the idea of ever ridding yourself of all of them. This is a fool’s errand. The colloquially-named noseeums that swarm in droves have earned their moniker. Settle for killing the bigger among the interlopers. Small, paper-white moths that dust your lampshade and fly in your face when you check your phone in bed. Beetles that crawl over your ceiling. Hard-backed things that crack when you kill them. Buzzing, long-legged drones that you can’t hope to identify. Grow paranoid. Twitch at the whisper of a hair against your arm.
Spot one of them stationed harmlessly on the wall above your bookshelf. Consider letting it live. It will be marginal, just big enough to alarm, just small enough to spare, maybe, but you have become jumpy and vindictive. Less than an inch in size, its almost-black body is long and thin and marked by slim yellow striations, the strokes of a careful calligrapher. You do not know what it is, and it scares you, and for this grievous sin it must die.
Squish it with a tissue because you are too much of a coward to allot this thing the dignity of a death by your bare hands. Watch, as it dies against the wall, the pulse of light it produces. The familiar yellow-green will erupt and fade again in a single, brief flicker of a snuffed flame.
Feel guilt close around you like the jaws of an iron maiden. You would not have killed it if you’d known what it was, this insect which you have, in other circumstances, revered, granted the rare privilege of crawling along your arm. You would have freed it, if you’d known, capturing it between a cup and a piece of paper, or even cradling it in your hands to release it from the front door.
But you did not know, and now it is, irrevocably, dead.
It will be difficult not to make a swan song of its last light. The human in you will want to turn this into something bigger than it is. Logically, you understand that it is a reflex, the insectoid equivalent to a last gasp or a cadaveric spasm. But you won’t be able to help thinking of it as a signal flare, released in the last desperate moment before death, a cry of pain, a warning to others of its kind. Admit to yourself that you know nothing of entomology, and that it could well be any of these things.
Flush it down the toilet like you do all the other ones, the only difference in its disposal the remorse you will afford it in place of disgust, this harmless thing you have murdered. It meant you no ill will, it could do you no harm.
Neither, of course, could all the others—you know this, you do. Tricked by the artificial light of your incandescent lamp, they do not understand that they will not find food, or shelter, or a mate in the world beyond your window. You will grant them no reprieve for this error of human ingenuity, though they also do not want to be in your bedroom. You know this, too. It does not stop you from killing them, and it does not instill you with the same sorrow you reserve for the firefly, though its bioluminescence is an evolutionary quirk just as random and circumstantial as hard carapace or ghost white wings, it has earned their species something that the others lack: your favor.
The summer will go on, despite your transgression. Certain you can recognize them, you will be careful now to watch for fireflies, though you will not encounter another.
Midway through the summer, you will discover your glaring mistake—the gap left between the half-open window pane that holds the air conditioning unit in place and the closed pane behind it, and you will mummify it with duct tape. This will alleviate the problem, but not fix it.
Use foam insulation next year. Kill no more fireflies. Learn nothing from the one whose light you extinguished, but think of it often.
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This is gloriously dry comedic writing. Well done.