Flies

It happened about six years ago. I had just gotten married. My husband and I moved into an apartment inherited from his grandmother. We did a major renovation (the workers tore down everything, even the concrete, and then refurbished it)—basically, it was clean and tidy.

It was late autumn. I came home after work one day, taking off my shoes, and saw a fly sitting on the ceiling. And not a regular housefly, but a gray one with red eyes. I was surprised—it was cold outside, all the windows were closed, where could it have come from? So, I swatted it with a fly swatter.

Ten minutes passed, I think. I was doing some housework. I passed the hallway and saw three flies already sitting on the ceiling. They were the same species, too. I was very surprised, but I killed them too. The strange thing was that they didn't even try to fly away; they just sat there, stuck to their seats.

 And then it all started. I'd leave the hallway somewhere, come back—three flies, then five, then more and more... I'd run around the apartment in a panic, looking for the place where they were coming from. I'd searched everywhere and finally found the source of my troubles. It was the vent in the bathroom; after the renovation, a mesh screen with a plastic grate had been attached to it. Well, the inside of the mesh was completely covered in these damned flies. I almost felt sick. I got out some dichlorvos and sprayed the whole nightmare with it. I didn't see the flies anymore.

I went online, typed "gray fly" into a search engine, and the first link I found was my "guests." This is what it said:

"Gray blowflies, or sarcophagids (lat. Sarcophagidae) are a family of dipterous insects. Their scientific name (from the Greek σαρκο, meaning "flesh" or "meat," and φάγος, meaning "devourer") refers to their habit of breeding on the corpses of vertebrates.

Our building has four floors. There are no rats or mice in sight. Our neighbors don't have pets either, and the attic vents are covered with metal mesh (I later learned this from the building manager). After questioning the neighbors above and below, who, by the way, don't have any mesh on their vents, I discovered that only my apartment had been attacked. I still can't explain this infestation of corpse-dwelling insects.