Erin Miller

“Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite.”
It turns out that this is not just the cute phrase I thought it was. Bed bugs are real, and at least in NYC, they’re back. People thought that they had been eradicated in the US, like polio. In fact, when one of my friends first went to the doctor for the itchy bites on his arm the doctor said, “Well, those look like bed bug bites, but they can’t be bed bug bites because we don’t have those in the U.S.”
In fact, most people in my parents’ generation have never seen a bed bug. My grandma has never seen one, though she remembers her mother making her search for them when they went to hotels. After the second world war, the bugs were nearly wiped out due to extensive use of DDT in extermination. But now that DDT is banned and more people are traveling internationally than before (offering the bugs hitchhiking options), they are back, with a vengeance. Mountains of mattresses form on the side walks on trash days. Our apartment has been the unwilling home to a couple of pests and we are currently undergoing an exhausting process of extermination, and preventative measures and as anyone will tell you, these pests are just plain hard to get rid of with modern chemicals.
Jon, chucking, likes to describe their rather unconventional method of mating, traumatic insemination, which is about as appealing as it sounds. This is the kind of thing I would rather not know.