GREY DAYS

March

Its March, 5 years after She killed herself. I'm living in a rented room up on North 8th Street. I can afford better, but this suits me. I couldn't bear living in that house anymore. I'm still teaching, and close enough to walk to my classroom and office in the McNulty building in 10 or 15 minutes. I have a Jetta, but I rarely drive it.

We had two kids. Brian, then 23, was one year out of Purdue, married, and working for General Electric in Lansing. Jessica, 19, was just finishing up her first year at Indiana State.

She went into the woods out back of the house and duct taped my shotgun to her neck. She had long, beautiful arms, just like the rest of Her, so pulling the trigger wasn't difficult. They found Her body the same evening, less than 5 hours after I reported her missing.

You'd think something like that would make a horrible mess, but it didn't. I hunted birds, mostly. The shells were low power 28 gauge birdshot. She had an undeniably calm look on Her face. The eyes were wide open, but unfocused. I wondered, then, why She wouldn't have taken one last look at the world she was departing. I have a better understanding of that now.

We weren't a close family. We did all the right things, but sometimes I think we were just following a script we didn't have the passion or energy to diverge from.

Although the memory of it fades, I allow myself to believe it wasn't always that way. When we first met, Her eyes were as blue as wild irises. And glowing, like fireflies. I remember waking up for the first time next to her - the morning sun casting on our bodies a warm zebra through the Venetian blinds - my arm resting on Her beast. I turned to Her and suddenly lost the power of speech. Telling Her how much I loved her at once seemed so inadequate.

After She left, Brian, Jessica and I quickly began to lose interest in each other's company. It wasn't much of a surprise. Whatever feelings we might have had for each other had been steadily draining away, from the moment She brought them into the world until the moment She left them alone in it. We never realized until She left how great the gulf had become between us. Now we all live our lives separately and cope as best we can. We talk, sometimes, but only because we schedule it on a calendar, to prove to ourselves we are normal. What is normal anyway?

A couple of weeks ago I was standing in the rotunda of the Student Union Building. I looked up, and thought I saw Her standing at the railing of the second floor balcony. I shook my head, blinked, and She was gone. Two days later I saw Her again, standing on the sidewalk on the other side of the Student Union Commons.

I saw Her many times after that - always distant, always vanishing when I looked closer.

June

Its summer now, and I'm teaching summer school. I can't remember a time when this campus was so barren of students! Some days I walk to class and don't see a single person. Not a single person, except...

My class is small. I teach in the afternoon. Oddly, the lights in the classroom seem dim. Is it my eyesight? I only have nine students, yet not all of them ever show up. They seem to emerge, like shadows, as I begin my lecture. I can't remember their names.

I'm seeing Her more often now, and closer. Several days ago I was downtown, having lunch at a table on the sidewalk outside of a little cafe just down from my favorite bookstore. How deserted the town seemed! The streets were practically empty. Here and there a car passed by - slowly: the windows dark, so you couldn't see anyone inside.

I had just finished shopping at the bookstore. No one was at the counter when I got there. After an hour, I found an interesting volume on the history of Roman Britain. I had to ring the little bell on the counter for several minutes before a man materialized from the back room and wordlessly accepted my credit card.

Lunch at the cafe was much the same. I sat at the table for 20 minutes before I finally got up and went into the cafe to find a waitress. She was way back in the back and seemed disinterested. No one else was in there but her: no one at the check-out, no other waitresses - no one else to wait on.

I ordered a bagel, cream cheese, a double espresso and water, then waited at a booth inside while she took the order back to the kitchen. I'd been to that cafe hundreds of times before and knew everyone who worked there, not to mention most of the patrons. But I didn't know this waitress, and had the eerie feeling that she and my order might just evaporate.

Now I'm back outside at a table on the sidewalk, eating my bagel and sipping my espresso. I look over, and She is sitting two tables down from me. She turns her head towards me and I see that same, unfocused look in Her eyes that she had when they found her out back in the woods.

September

Mrs. Prior, my landlady is a plump, 70'ish woman with no distinctive characteristics. She doesn't seem tied to a past or aimed at a future, but just dropped here into the present like some child's incomplete vision of what a kindly old lady should be like.

There are three other borders here and I've only seen fleeting glimpses of them - though lately, not even that. I leave my rent check on a little table in the kitchen down the narrow hall on the first floor.

Yesterday, I took my check down to the kitchen, laid it down on the table, and called out for Mrs. Prior.

Silence.

The house is large, but not that large. I walk around through every room until I'm back in the kitchen. I stand before the door to the basement.

I open it.

I'm staring at a hard, thick, black. The kind of black that isn't satisfied with basements, but wants dominion over the dimly lit refuges we humans cower in. Inanely, I say:

"Mrs Prior?"

A pause.

"Yes." Her voice drifts back. Now I see, down where the bottom of the stairs ought to be in all that black ink, the tiny disc of her face.

"What do you want?" She says. The disc begins to enlarge.

"Nothing." I say, and close the door, ever so slowly. I retreat to my room.

Later on, I tiptoe down the stairs and walk outside. Its cold. The streetlights are on. Their light recedes when I look at it and expands when I look away, accompanied by the sound of cellophane being crumpled up.

At an intersection ahead, dimly, I see many people walking together in groups. But when I reach the intersection they are not there. Across the street, She is leaning up against a street sign.

I'm not afraid. I wish I could be. I cross the street and stand next to Her - so close I can smell Her.

I teach mathematics. As a boy, I committed myself to the belief that mathematics represents truth, and everything else more or less represents a corruption of truth.

December

She and I are back together, and everyone else has departed. Mrs. Prior is gone, the streets and sidewalks are empty and no one comes to my class.

Her eyes, I can't remember what they looked like before now.

At night I rub my leg against Her's, raise myself and look into her eyes. They aren't blue anymore.

When I am alone I compose my proofs that this life is better than none at all.

End

La La La

I knew what flies looked like.

Dad had a work shed out back. He always kept it padlocked, so I never got in there. But I could pull up a wooden barrel under the single window on the side of the shed and try to peer inside. A dirty window shade was always pulled down, so I never saw anything. But there were always hundreds of flies piled up between the shade and the window. The biggest one was smaller than a pencil eraser.

This one was a lot bigger. Mom had taken us for lunch at FreddiBurger. I never liked it there. The burgers were underdone and had funny odor, the onion rings were sodden. I always asked for a bowl of tomato soup and ice water.

The man and his wife sitting at the table next to us were fat ("corpulent" would be a better word, but I didn't know it back then). They bulged everywhere, like the big pink balloon figures the scary looking clown had made to entertain us at Mae's 6th birthday party. The man was stuffed uncomfortably into a damp tweed suit and his wife into a floral patterned dress. It was hard for me not to stare at them.

The fly that landed on the back of the man's bald head was huge. At least as big around as a half dollar: bottle green and slate colored, with tiny striations of yellow and black. It sat on the back of his head for a moment, then a long, barbed proboscis emerged from beneath the faceted eyes and sank into the head. For long moments, the fly seemed to pulsate.

I was aghast. I tried to look away. I wanted to stand up, scream and point, but no one else in the restaurant seemed to notice. After awhile, the proboscis, now covered with red, pulled back out. A drop of blood ran down the back of the man's neck and stained his white shirt collar. He kept on eating his FreddiBurger as if nothing had happened.

The big fly lifted off the man's head and began to circle around the restaurant with a low, barely audible hum. I could see it plainly, why couldn't anyone else? It drifted over to hover directly in front of me no more than a foot from my face. I was terrified! My sister Mae and Mom just kept eating. Mom looked over at me, her face partially obscured by the giant insect between us.

"What's the matter Lewis?" She said. "Don't you like your soup?" The fly edged closer to me.

Instinctively I reached out to swat it away. The palm of my hand hit it squarely. It was heavy, like a baseball, and tumbled out of the air to land on the floor several feet from our table, where it flopped and flittered. The low humming rose to a high pitched, uneven buzz. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the fat man and his wife had turned to stare at me, their eyes pinched into an accusing glare. After a few seconds they turned back slowly and continued eating.

The buzzing noise had stopped. I looked back at the floor and the fly was gone.

"Mom!" I shouted.

Mom started. "Keep your voice down Lewis." She said. "Yes. What?"

"Did you see it?" I said...

I won't trouble you with the rest of it. Of course no one saw the fly but me.

I was 11 then. Dad left when I was 12. Mom sold the house a few months afterwards. The buyer was an investor who planned to turn the house
into a duplex and rent it out. At the time, no one seemed interested in removing the padlock from Dad's work shed. So there it sat, locked up, silent and ignored.

When I was 14, the news of The Incident splashed into the newspapers as far away as Des Moines. Maybe even farther. For some reason, the renters in the downstairs apartment at our old house had gotten curious and pried off the hasp which held the padlock on the door to the shed. What they found in there sent them screaming back to the house to call 911. After they got there, a couple of the cops who went inside the shed came out and got sick in the back yard. Later on they were never able to track Dad down. Who knows where he is now and what he is doing?

I'm much older now and on my own. I don't sleep well. As you might expect, the memory of the fly keeps me up. But I never saw another one of them again. So, sometimes I try to believe it was just a little kid's swollen imagination, or maybe something in the tomato soup. But there is one other thing.

One afternoon shortly after I saw the fly in the restaurant, when we were all still living together at the old house, a van pulled up in the driveway. My bedroom was on the back corner of the second story, next to the driveway, and it was sheer coincidence that I happened to be looking out. The van was one of those gaudy conversion jobs: shabby and beat up: bottle green with faded black and yellow accents. As I watched, Dad emerged from the shed with crate on a handcart and approached the van. The driver got out, opened up the side panel door and the two of them lifted the crate into the van.

The driver was the same fleshy man I had seen getting bitten by the fly back at the restaurant. After they closed the van door, he and Dad abruptly looked up at me. Both of them had little smiles on their faces. I lurched away from the window.

So that keeps me up too.

This is why I put my hands over my ears, shut my eyes and say "la la la" over and over whenever anyone brings up the subject of flies - or cannibalism.

End