Ctenocephalides Felis

If you’ve been following the past few posts, I’ve trapped and found homes for four feral felines. Wild kittens, to be exact. But wait, there’s more, in this final installment of Four Feral Felines.

Yes, they were gone, but they left me with more than I’d ever given them.  They left me with little creatures, called Ctenocephalides felis, officially described in The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders as having “distinctive, laterally flattened abdomens with many spines and bristles” and “mouthparts with 3 piercing stylets to suck blood.”  They’re also described as having “enlarged coxae,”  something God never saw fit to bestow on me.

It began with morning itching, usually on my ankles.  I didn’t think much of it at first.  Then one morning I was at work in a meeting with about 20 other people, sitting on a couch between two coworkers.  I saw this dark brown bug a little smaller than a match head crawling up my pant leg.  When I reached down to flick it, it disappeared.  Kind of like a PING, or a spring, which is what those enlarged coxae are really for.  This was great.  I was about to spread plague to me office mates.  Would the young lady in the office next door ever sleep with me after I’d given her my fleas?

I’d wake up every morning with a bunch of tiny welts decorating my calves like red anklets.  Then they decided to move on up in the world and attack other parts of me, including the area around my coxae.  As my social life was put on hold, I figured out what to do.  My first reaction was to go out and buy enough defogger to deflea the People’s Liberation Army.  I set all these spray grenades off and then left the house for several hours, as instructed.  I also bought flea spray and fumigated under my bed, the couch, the carpeting, the lawn, everywhere I lay down a lot.  Whew!  No more fleas.  Thank God that’s over with.

A few days later I feel a minute stab on my thigh and see one of the pleasant little suckers scaling my blue jeans again.  Did I mention to you that, unlike lice, fleas will attack hosts other than their preferred chump species?  I know all there is to know about fleas now.  For example, the kittens never exhibited symptoms of infestation because fleas have a reproductive cycle of several weeks.  They were pupating when I had the kittens. Just call me if you have queries.

Then the exterminator had to come.  I had to convince him that, yes, people really do get fleas. Lemme tell you, no offense against the Orkin man or anything, but these guys who spray poison for a living? They don’t opt for exterminating as an alternative career choice to experimental particle physics.  I think the nerve agents they use affect their own CNS’s after a few months.  So this isn’t the kind of guy you’d want on your debate team.  But really— he was a nice guy.  And he wasn’t stupid enough to have fleas.

The exterminator recommended I get my carpet cleaned with “deep steam cleaning, to make sure you get the eggs.” He’d have to be back in a month for a second round of spraying.  Meantime I had to wash all my clothes, including everything in the dresser drawers which I routinely leave open as an alternative to getting up with enough time in the morning to open and close my dresser drawers.  I also had to scald all of my bedding, afghans, pillows (I found out which pillows really were washable and which weren’t after I washed them).  I had to wash everything textile.  I had to take apart my bed and vacuum the undercarriage.  I’m writing this whole thing a year after the fact.  And you’ve got to know that as I was writing this, my ankles started to itch and I was seized with the involuntary thought that the next generation of vermin had been waiting all this time to spring to life, hiding in the little slots between my floorboards.  That tendency to scratch was especially pronounced the first few weeks after extermination.  Left to the imagination, any itch means a flea orgy’s about to start.  Tiny imperfections in the skin are flea hickies.

A few weeks after the incident, there hadn’t been any recrudescence of symptoms.  Recrudescence.  Isn’t that a cool word?  I learned it in the graduate program I never finished. Anyway, I’m taking a bath when I see this flea float like flotsam in the soapy pond scum that coalesces at the end of a summer bath.  I took the specimen out of the water, which had bloated its body.  I looked at it under a magnifying glass, but it was too wet and twisted to positively identify with my Audubon field guide.  But I knew it was a flea.  I knew they were back, just like friends indeed when I had weed.  The extermination hadn’t worked.  I spied and studied and inspected and scrutinized the tiny thorax and abdomen of my specimen.  I even got entomological and mounted it on the head of a pin so I could behold its little specimen self.  Yeah, it had the powerful hind legs, at least it had one of them.  There were the whisker-like spines.  Eccch!  They were back.  They’d won.  My exterminator really was a moron after all.

The specimen dried, and it turned out to be a big brown piece of lint.  Who was the moron? There is no Audubon field guide for lint specimens, so how was I supposed to know? Maybe fleas have an atypical metamorphosis that transforms them into cotton during the larval stage.  All I know is, I haven’t seen a flea since.

I often wonder what I was supposed to learn out of this flea circus.  At the time, I thought it was that no good deed goes unpunished.  But maybe it’s just that when we reach toward something, we gotta go all the way, fleas and all.

Maybe one of these days or lifetimes, I’ll learn that lesson.  And I’ll bet when I do, it’s a cat that teaches me.

© 2022 by Michael C. Just

Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.

You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23

Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002

Four of his short stories have recently been published online:

Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)

The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW

I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October

Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within