The Fly

One

The air was hot that morning, hot enough to have been mistaken for a ravenous fever endured through the night before. Sweat clouded in blotches on the plain grey T Jack Crudin wore to bed every night. The moisture under his arms sent cool tingles of relief whenever he would roll over onto his side. It must be 110 degrees outside, he thought, turning onto his left shoulder, kicking the rest of the blanket down to the far edge of the bed. The damn thing added like 10 extra degrees. In and out of sleep for what seemed like an hour had brought him to the conclusion that he should probably get up. The sun was rising through the blinds outside and the shadows were shrinking.

But there was this noise that surfaced in his eardrums. At first he thought his wife was using an electric shaver for her legs in the corner of the room, but this kind of logic only made sense in the half lunacy his grottiness conjured. He dismissed the hum for a figment of his imagination and continued to shake himself awake. But the sound never dissipated and instead only gradually got louder.

As his consciousness became more aware, he realized that the sound was not an electric shaver, oh no, there was a fucking bug in his room. The buzzing sound was actually the incessant vibration of tiny wings circling the airspace in his room. Upon discovering this, he lurched himself up to a right angle and forced his eyelids to pry themselves open. And what he saw nearly caused him to piss himself. He remained absolutely still from the shock on the nature that mother nature invited into his room. It was a bee...no...it was a horsefly...no, not a horsefly. It was just an ordinary fly with an abnormally proportionate size. If he had to guess it was approximately the size of his thumb or even perhaps a normal sized thimble. Either way the motherfucker was big and he could feel his skin suffuse with intangible pricklings. He hated bugs: roaches the most, but this fly was pretty close to his hatred for the domestic, disease ridden scavengers. A few times it came in close, like a kamikaze fighter jet, perhaps to make a provisional landing on his temple. Jack bolted out of bed after swatting both hands frenetically and blindly into the air. He backed into the corner wedged between the door and his wife's dresser. He was still half awake and half mystified as to how such an abomination has allowed itself to have slinked it's way into his domain----his house for fucks sake!

Eventually the fly landed on the window pane by seeping itself through one of the slats on the north side of the room. Tip-tapping with its tiny legs in a serpentine formation up and up, searching for an exit through the invisible barrier to the outdoor world. Jack saw his opportunity and seized the Time magazine on top of the dresser, furled it up, and gingerly approached the invader. Wary of the fact that it might notice his presence and leap away; he couldn't have that, his heart would crash through his ribcage and try to flee out the window itself. And man was its size excruciating to his normal perception of the pest. Senses heightened and keen like a cheetah in the African bushes, hands trembled and legs twitched, his face was stern and motionless.

He was close now and the fly busied itself by rubbing together its squalid feelers. Quickly he used the pull string and lifted up the blinds. When he swung, the motion was fortuitous, hardly recognized to have happened at all with how nimble that glossy paper wafted towards the finger smeared window.

Direct hit: to his anticipated surprise, guts splattered like an exclamation-word bubble in a heated comic book conversation. Green and black secretion blotted about two percent of the entire pane's luminosity. Legs and chunks of abdomen were splayed incongruously in the cesspool. Such a display caused his gag reflex to reflux and almost didn't make it to the toilet at the end of the hall. Nothing came out, but the experience was nonetheless painful and astringent. His throat clogged with mucus and stomach bile that threatened to scour his throat.

Without even thinking about what he was doing, he flushed the toilet by lazily by scuffing the base of his palm on the lever even though there was nothing in it. What the ever living fuck, he thought, I wonder what Gayle woulda thought about that one. It definitely wasn't something that would make him feel hungry that morning. Speaking of which, he checked the time on his phone: 12:09 p.m. Already past noon. This wasn't normal, even for him; he was used to waking up at odd hours of the morning for his landscaping job. But he was on vacation, only one day in to say the least, and was already making himself look bad. Especially because his wife Gayle rammed a drill up his ass anytime he would wake up past 8 a.m. (normally he wakes up around 7 to 7:30). Regardless, he was in no mood to eat anymore.

He grabbed paper towels to clean up the mess on the window, Gayle would throw a fit if she saw all that shit up there. Just the thought of approaching it again made him gag once more, and on that note he snatched off about 3 more rectangles off of their paper towel roller in the kitchen. He didn't even want to feel the texture of even one leg between the layers upon layers of paper towels he had clutched like a baseball mitt in his right hand. That is a fucking waste, do you really need to use that much? Gayle would probably say to him if she were here with him right now. But he didn't care. Not enough anyway to let those unsaid words get to his manhood. Yeah, he was frightened of pests: rats, roaches, centipedes (a lot of those fuckers out here in dirt county), mice, snakes, lizards, but who wouldn't? Why should he be demoralized because of a common rational fear? Nonetheless, his wife's reign of terror would prevent him from bringing that up to her again. He decided it was best to man up and get it over with. And so he did reluctantly, and after leaving a greenish-grey smear on the window, he would then decide to grab an entirely new paper towel for that after he threw that wad in his hand away first. Not in any trash can in the house, of course, out front in the blue recycling bin. He didn't want the slightest tincture of bug gut particles to find their way into his respiratory system.

After pushing the screen door open and letting it snap back into place like the cheap piece of shit that it was, he was surprised to be convened by a clamor of winged visitors searching for refuge by the bins just outside their garage house. Needless to say, that wad of paper towels fell from his clammy hands.