I can’t even hear the flies. Not unless they’re next to my ear. Crawling in the canal. Buzzing past it. I have no food out. I don’t even eat sugar. They crawl in. They crawl in through cracks I cannot find. They crawl into my fridge and find nothing to eat. They die in piles beneath food they’ve never entered. I don’t understand why they go to the fridge. There are only eggs, broccoli, sealed containers of yogurt, vacuum packed meats.
All these flies crawl into my house to die. They fly around first though. It started simply enough, with two or three, manageable. None of them were in my garbage bin. There were no fruits laying around. I don’t drink booze. They just appeared. Two or three flies, buzzing around at all times. Easily ignored. Fine. I made an effort to kill one if it got too close, at times I was successful. I thought this would be enough. For about a week, it was. But their numbers did not go down.
Into the second week these small creatures began landing on me. Often. Barely felt, they touch the skin, then move about my forest of hair. That’s the only way I feel them, when they tousle my arm hair, leg hair, belly hair. When I move to destroy them, they touch off easily, they sense my movements. I killed only about one in seven that touched me. Nowhere near enough. Their cloud densed.
By the third week I’d removed every item of food from my house. Wiped down every surface with bleach. I was slapping at my skin constantly. I was killing many more by this point. My technique had improved, but there were so many fruit flies that it’d’ve been harder to miss.
These creatures are tiny, delicate. Nonviolent. They do not do anything painful. They don’t need to. Their mere existence is an affliction. They clog my senses. Tiny pricks of black erratic across my vision constantly, touching my skin and making off. No amount of murder solves the problem. It does strange things to one’s sense of morality too, constantly killing these small creatures. Smashing them, watching them smear to bits across my skin, across the walls and tables and counters. I would grab my vacuum and suck up a small cloud, find another behind me, find another where the first one was. No amount of slaughter worked.
My face became a twitching grimace. Outbursts became common. I was no longer cooking, living off of fast food, only going out once a day. Eating quickly in my car and returning home.
I’d filled every bowl and cup with vinegar and soap. They crowded to overflow. I bought poisons and gassed the house. These only provided a carpet of dead flies to feel between my toes as their brothers shrouded my head. Breathing became difficult. I started to wear a mask at all times, goggles. Boots. Their small bodies deepened, filled the halls and rooms of my house. I came to rest in my living room. I sat on the sofa and considered my options.
Angry, screaming, I took my zippo and flicked it open under the nozzle of a can of Raid. Slight compression, quick light. An explosion. The cloud erupted into flames which threw me through my wall and collapsed on top of me. The whole house exhaled a billow of fire, blasting doors and windows from their holes. Sudden silence settled.
Smoke was clearing. I waved my hand through it to try to see what had become of my home, but my hand hit a thousand tiny objects which gave way before it. My mask was gone and the flies crawled in my nostrils. I opened my mouth to scream and they climbed in. I tried to spit but every instance of pursed lips and gasping breath invited more insects into my mouth. I slapped at my skin. I writhed. I cried and flies came through my tear ducts. The tears crawled over my eyes and everything was black.
