Right now, I’m listening to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith.
This novel has an interesting premise – and I hope I’m not giving too
much away here – that Abraham Lincoln was driven by a single-minded obsession
with hunting and slaying vampires. The
sheer number of vampires who populated America according to this novel is kind
of mind-boggling, like all those people who turn out to actually be Wesen on an
episode of Grimm.
I kind of
relate to Lincoln. Of course, I have
never encountered a vampire, that I know of, but my world has been
populated with any number of creepy, crawly, and sometimes flying creatures who
must be eliminated. Yes, I would wager a
guess that in real life undesirable insects greatly outnumber both vampires and Wesen.
Unlike
Lincoln I do not hunt insects. As long
as I don’t actually see them, I am more than happy to live and let them
live. I am, in fact, the very picture of
laissez-faire when it comes to the unseen insect, or even those seen in the
great outdoors. However, once they show
up on my “turf” (i.e. inside my home or office space) they just have to
go. Never mind that some of them are
supposedly harmless. They all multiply,
and we simply can’t have that.
I never
needed any special weapons like Lincoln required with his vampires. I just basically smash the bugs with whatever
is nearby. Then those pesky stink bugs
made their unsightly appearance. You
can’t just kill these bugs because they emit a ghastly odor if you do that will
only attract more of them. Hmm, getting
rid of these little critters required a vacuum cleaner or a toilet, but I
adapted.
Fearlessly,
I continue to deal with the critters who come my way.
Wait, I
think I hear my husband yelling something like, “What do you mean, ‘fearlessly’?” He is undoubtedly referring to that one
singular incident, not long after we married, when the large bug scurried out
from under my toothbrush when I was getting ready to brush my teeth. I audibly expressed my shock, because it startled me. I may have “screamed,” as
my husband alleges.
He came
rushing to the bathroom to see what was wrong, clearly envisioning that I was
in some kind of imminent peril.
“What’s
the matter?” he asked,
breathlessly.
“Oh, it
was a bug,” I said, disgusted.
“A
bug??!!” he said, in disbelief.
“Well, it
jumped out at me,” I explained. “I was
startled.”
My
husband was clearly trying to calm his beating heart from the fright I had
given him.
“Did the
bug have a gun?”, he asked incredulously.
By this
time, my son had casually wandered out of his bedroom, and had assessed the
situation.
“Oh, that
was nothing,” he told my husband, “You should have heard her the time the bird
got in the house at Canonsburg.”
Well, I
said I wasn’t afraid of bugs. Birds and
rodents are another story entirely.