Fly

Here is a short story about a fly, and about writing, and being near writing, and death, and public reaction, and laughing at yourself.

Enjoy. 

***

Flies don’t live long. Three weeks, on average, for my kind. In any case, we spend our time in gargantuan rooms, privy to the whims of you all. There is a great network of fly gossip. We live for it, die for it, it is the sap of our little lifetimes, delicious and rapid.

I live on the white speckled wall of a writer. He leaves great pools of sweet brown and yellow liquids in the bottom of ridged bottles. My tasty lakes. I suck up what I can. He’ll write another story. I’ll touch my legs together. Our ritual.

He writes one about murder. Not a murder, but the concept. Teasing out some dirty truth about the strained act of observing. She was killed, he writes, slow as a sunset. A frail woman with a long Sunday ahead of her. Rancid alive, oddly clean in death. Christmas time.

In the story, a woman speaks. Unseen and youthful. Lithe, combative. The perfect female counterpart to the author’s stoic voice.
“Just because she was conservative,” says this princess of the story, “that doesn’t make it funny.”

The author pauses, stressed. Furrowed brow of consternation. The woman on the page continues,
“She was a frail old woman. Killed in her own home.”
“I don’t know,” replies a character, Steve,
“she was racist, I mean really horrible.”
“Yes, but-“
“They strung her up in Christmas lights.”
A twinkle in Steve’s eye, just then.
“They left a little black Santa at the scene.”

The woman frowns. Steve implores:
“Isn’t that a bit funny?”

The author smiles delicately, just a little. Hard to suppress. He gets up, satisfied, to retrieve a drink from the fridge. At that, I fall from the wall. Land with a pif on the cream-coloured rug. Let my legs curl inward in that way that so repulses.

He can’t know it, but I’m smiling too.