Flies

"The date would have been stellar, had it not been for those damn flies..."

The date would have been stellar, had it not been for those damn flies. We’d just finished our sandwiches, soaking in the sunshine on the patio of a McAlister’s Deli. Sarina and I spent the first thirty or so minutes chatting about the little things— work gossip, the latest season of The Bachelor, and how much we both hated our mothers. Soon enough, the conversation drifted into deeper waters. It was our third date, and we’d graduated to discussing our exes. “He hit me,” she said. “I drew the line there.”

I spoke about my first girlfriend from high school, Vanessa Highmore. We dated through senior year then she dumped me because according to her I had, “nothing going on up there.” I can still remember the way she poked my forehead when she said that, how firmly that finger pressed into my skull. Since then, I’d only dated a handful of times, none of those brief flirtations and romantic escapades going anywhere. It’d been three years since I’d made it to a third date, not since college.

I told Sarina all this with the aplomb of a man who’d been through hell and back, a veteran of heartbreak. And she listened to every word of it, with bright, pale, attentive eyes. Her pink lips drifted occasionally into sly smiles then puckered into seriousness. By this point, I’d been yapping away for nearly ten minutes, and most of the girls I dated hated that sort of rambling; they never rolled their eyes or yawned, but you could see how desperately they wanted to.

But this gorgeous, smart, funny, woman stuck around, sat through every um and uh and awkward stutter. So how could I not begin to fall in love with Sarina Bowers? And I would’ve kept falling in love with her. But the first fly buzzed in, right when she said, “I think you’re incredibly smart. I love listening to you.”

My heart fluttered, felt like it could have burst through my chest and flown away with angel’s wings. But that damn fly. . . Bzzzzzzzzzzz. Long, droning. Big flies have that low rumble, deep with bass and loud enough to rattle your brain if one gets close enough to your ear. And this one did—man, it loved my ear.

I slapped the side of my face. Sarina jerked back in her chair.

“Sorry,” I said. “I almost got it.”

She chuckled and said, “It’s okay. So, you don’t talk to any of your exes, like at all, right?”

“No, no, no. I don’t think it’s a good idea. Besides, I’m a busy guy now. And you’re a lot more interesting…”

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

The fly returned. This time, he brought a friend. They looked like blow flies—thick, dark green torsos and beady brown eyes. One of them landed on the crumbs of my BLT, looking up at me from a little chunk of left-behind bacon.

“Damn another one,” Sarina said. “There must be garbage nearby.”

Sarina’s lips broke open just a hair, and I saw the next words forming on her tongue just before the sustained chorus of blow flies swarmed in and interrupted her, rumbling like an insectile Gregorian chant. One of them stuck to my eyebrow, another to my thumb, then another on my chin. They attacked the scattered crumbs on my plate. They danced around each other in balletic forms, twisting, circling, zipping back-and-forth.

“Oh my God,” I heard Sarina say, but I didn’t see her say it because now the swarm of flies had gotten so big, all I could see was a black cloud, like white noise on a dead TV channel.

I scooted back in my chair and swatted at them furiously. With every masculine urge I could muster, I tried to keep silent and slap, hit, shake those things off me. I tried and tried, but the swarm seemed to only grow larger, backing me into the restaurant’s window. I can imagine now what the old couple sitting at the booth behind the glass were seeing: a man deliriously patting away at an apocalyptic cascade of bugs, like something out of the Old Testament.

“Ahhh!” It escaped me. I couldn’t help it. I blurted a sharp scream.

I couldn’t see Sarina anymore. For all I knew, she booked it out of there and never looked back. I fell to the ground, and the dull, blunt thud of concrete struck my head. I tried to look through the swarm, to see anything, anyone—but it was a buzzing void.

Faintly, I saw the tan outline of my hands in front of my face, but they looked distant, and there were too many flies crawling on them to gather a solid image. “Somebody help him!!” I heard someone shout.

Thwack! Thwack! I slapped myself, every part of my face—slapped myself silly. I felt the sting on my cheeks and I thought about my mother’s hands. I thought about Vanessa Highmore sticking her finger on my forehead. I thought about Sarina Bower’s look of horror just before the beautiful afternoon transformed into a black haze of flies. Just like whenever I got dumped, ghosted, or left out to dry by a pretty girl, I thought to myself, Why me? Why does it have to be me? Why can’t it just work out—fall into place?

I opened my mouth and tried to scream again, tried to shout Sarina’s name but it only came out in a husky, abbreviated “Sarrrhhhh…..” Flies clustered into my mouth. I felt them bundling and sliding down my throat. When this happened, I remembered the time I stuck my toothbrush too far back when I was a kid and threw up all over the bathroom sink. Only this time, I couldn’t throw up, no matter how much I gagged. The flies clogged my throat.

My fingernails scraped along the ground as I dragged my body somewhere, anywhere—any place away from the monstrosity I’d somehow invited to what had been a wonderful date. Before the flies came, I thought I’d even try to kiss that girl. Kiss her like I really meant it.

Sharp, immense pain seared across my body, like little teeth sinking into every bit of my flesh. This is what happens to dead things, I thought. Of course, it’s blow flies. They feast on rotting meat. Maybe there really wasn’t anything going on “up there.” Maybe Vanessa Highmore was right all along. Maybe Sarina Bowers was lucky to watch me be eaten alive by those flies. Maybe I was never cut out for this sort of thing. Maybe I’d never get my rose and I’d always be a bachelor.

Then, just as faintly as I saw  my own hands, I caught a glance of Sarina standing by our table with her hands covering her mouth. I saw those pale eyes and pink lips, just for a moment, so brief it was like a distant memory. And I thought, She listened to me. She listened to every bit of it. I remembered what she said to me, just moments before the flies appeared: I think you’re incredibly smart. I love listening to you.

Just as quickly as the image of her standing shocked and aghast appeared, it vanished into a blur of flies. And I thought that, maybe, this wasn’t such a bad date after all. These flies are just like everything else that’s happened to me, every former love—confounding, inexplicable, suffocating, unnatural, and bizarre.

But this time, at least, she really listened. And for a moment I felt like somebody heard me, somebody cared, somebody felt the same fluttering wings of the heart. I held onto the image of Sarina Bowers as long as I could, then the pain stopped and the soft buzz of a fly drifted through the back of my head. There is something going on up there, always flying around. Even now, as I lay dying on the patio outside McAlister’s Deli, the flies stripping the meat off my bones, there’s something going on up there— the low droning of a harmless fly, and the beautiful, listening face of Sarina Bowers.