WaterSpiders

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