I’ve been attacked by nature this summer. If I venture outside for more than fifteen minutes, it’s like I’ve spent the last 38 hours trapped in an entomology lab, covered in grape jelly. Bugs of all shapes and sizes have feasted on my extremities, leaving behind a range of souvenirs — Texas-shaped hives on my upper legs from an assault by ants, rows of parallel mosquito bites along my Achilles heels, raised eruptions on my arms courtesy of a pack of black flies, and angry neck welts left by some kind of wasp-pterodactyl hybrid. I look like I’ve just escaped from two months in a pharmaceutical testing plant, the kind PETA hasn’t caught up with yet.

I’m not usually the one who draws the flesh-eating hordes — most summers I can count on Boyfriend to attract every multi-legged creature in the area while I sit back unmolested. But somehow my natural repellent hasn’t kicked in this year — maybe it’s all the sugar.

But really, there’s only one explanation I can come up with for the sudden bug blitzkrieg: the insects have a vendetta. They’ve sworn collective payback for all those years of squashing spiders with dictionaries and sleeping with a RAID can by my bed. As a result, I’ve been forced to counterattack, reaping furious vengeance on every winged or antennaed creature that wanders into our apartment. Fuzzy caterpillars and cute little moths are paying the price for their blood-sucking cousins’ vigilantism. I’ve never been one to share my living space with anything that flies or crawls, but now it’s personal.

“Shouldn’t we just open the window and let them fly out?” Boyfriend asks.

I don’t answer because I’m not listening — I’m busy climbing up the side of a nine-foot bookshelf and smacking a folded New Yorker against the wall, in hopes of pulverizing an unfortunate housefly that’s taken refuge on the ceiling. “Die bug! Die for your crimes!”

“Ok, I really don’t think that’s the best–”

CRASH! The first book hits the floor, followed by about twenty more. My one steady hand slides off the shelf, my hip bone smacking the hardwood floor as a cascade of Russian novels and outdated law textbooks comes down on my head.

“Jesus!” Boyfriend sits bolt upright in bed, the only logical place he’d be given that it’s 3 in the morning. “Don’t you think maybe you could let the fly live this time?”

“Not a chance,” I smirk. Cat runs over to sniff the wreckage, then bats at the mangled fly corpse hanging off the edge of my magazine. “I feel much better now. Where’d you put the Calamine?”