Pestilence.
The Beast we adopted is neither a white horse nor has any knowledge of scripture, but she has indeed brought a plague upon our house. At first, she hated us, hid from us, attacked us; we disliked her enough to want to send her back to the people who gave her to us. Her tiny little brain must have understood our desperate conversation with the original owner, because, all of sudden, she became.....sweet. I'm sure, in her cat brain, she is realizing that she can kill us with kindness, but we fell for it anyway and decided to keep her.
So once she gets all loving and nice, and sleeps on our bed with us, and sits on our laps and snuggles agains us, what happens? She brings in a flea infestation. And I'm not talking a few fleas here and there. I'm talking a full-fledged, Biblical-level scourge. The kind where we pay an exorbitant amount to exterminate the buggers, only to have a reinfestation two weeks later with the spawn of the dead fleas.
Hundreds of dollars later, the Beast is fine. There are no more fleas on her because we have given her pills to poison the f**kers. But the eggs keep falling onto the carpet and hatch there and make us want to burn our own apartment down.
One of my friends asked me why I can't ask the landlord to replace the carpet with hardwood floor.
She has clearly never rented a rent-controlled apartment before.
The Spazz deserves a medal as the best soldier in this battle. He has vacuumed the apartment dozens of times; we added more flea poison to the guest room (only to find out our houseguest is still being bitten). We've done countless loads of laundry, washing bedding and clothing in the hopes that we kill them off. We do daily carpet scans looking for those little pests, pressing our faces to the floor with flashlights in hand, ready to kill and vacuum some more. Friends with pets sigh with condolences for our situation, but no one has a ready remedy.
Meanwhile, as I write this, the Beast is sitting behind me, shedding more flea eggs and plotting her next attack on our household.
