oddbagel:

When I was in high school we had a really weird fad that got way out of hand. Some kid had found out how to tie tiny strings to the legs of flies so he could carry it around and keep it as a pet. Teachers couldn’t really do anything about it since it was just a fly, y’know. They aren’t so uncommon in schools. Anyway, he started teaching more kids how to do it and it caught on.

Soon every kid in the school had pet flies tied to strings. They’d even get like multiple flies and carry them around like fly balloons. Even some teachers were getting in on it. Personally, I never got into it but I didn’t have the dexterity needed to do something precise as tying a string around a fly’s leg. No one would help me with it either. I was introvert and weirdo with no friends. I still am.

Things started to fall apart when state testing came around and the sound of constant buzzing became way more aggravating to everyone. There was also the problem of flies dying and the floors being covered in dead fly bodies. Like, despite having them as pets people still didn’t like touching flies with their bare hands. When the flies died they just left them on the floors, seats, and desks or whatever. It wasn’t uncommon to sit in a seat just covered in dead flies. You get used to having fly corpses, and fly juice on your butt after a while.

Even though fly pets were eventually banned (and hefty punishments were thrown out for anyone caught with pet flies), there was still a large amount of flies left in the school. The school had basically become a breeding ground for flies. Lunch was inedible because of all the maggots. They’d even be dripping from the ceilings and stuff. They had to shut down school for at least a month to get the exterminators to purge the place. It wasn’t that effective. There were just so many maggots in every nook and cranny of the school that no amount of exterminators could effectively purge the place without completely knocking down the school.

So, the principal decided to release a modest of amount of spiders into the school to eat all of the flies and maggots. Long story short, it didn’t work. They just managed to create a weird fly-spider based ecosystem in the school. The school had to reopen eventually, and everyone just got used to all of the flies and spiders. The cafeteria had to be moved to a nearby building since the school’s cafeteria had become so infested with spiders and maggots that it had to be locked off.

I moved away at the beginning of my senior year. It was weird adjusting to a school that wasn’t filled with bugs, but I made some cool friends there. My old high school burned down. No one was hurt, but arson wasn’t ruled out. It burned so long and so hard that the land on it had basically become scorched hell. They rebuilt the school elsewhere. They say that if you go to the old school’s location on a dark night, you can see a weird man walking around with tons of ghostly flies tied to his fingers. They say that you can hear them screaming for mercy. That’s probably not true, though.