The Fly Entourage

The flies were fat and slow as they buzzed and hopped seemingly everywhere the Woman chose to put every part of her body. They buzzed slowly past her ear and she could almost decipher what they were always going on about as she waggled her fingers constantly to shoo them away. In fact, it seemed, they would have landed on her eyes if they could have, but even if this were physically possible, today they would have only room to peer through the slits her eyes had become as she stared back at them, the fly's kaleidoscope of vision seeing only a rainbow of dents, dings and slippage in her normally bright soul. If the fly blinked, which they rapidly did, it would create a fantastic slide show of what was stuck in her throat, sinking in her heart and creating a slow anesthetic around her otherwise compulsive optimism.

It was beautifully horrible and just the thing a fly would enjoy.

It was for this reason, deep down, that each of her co-workers, family members and a few acquaintances secretly were happy to see her. The flies followed the Woman and they saved small pittances on fly swatters, not to mention the energy it took to wave their hands about. They lived around the woman uninterrupted by the flies. However, no one said anything about it to each other. It was not something that came up on the phone, over coffee or as a subject in the sentence starting with "Did you happen to notice?" No, it was such a strange phenomenon that no one brought up what was on the tip of their tongue because surely it was not something worth speaking of. Especially since the woman happened to smell of spiced oranges and had beautiful dark hair that seemed to grow with the changing of the seasons. She was not dirty. Actually, she was quite attractive and was it not for the fly entourage; she would have had several suitors.

The fly entourage had no explanation to the naked or even the human eye. To the fat fly's eye, which fed on garbage and mated with the discarded, the cinematic kaleidoscope they saw in the Woman's eyes was dinner and an ever rotating porn flick.

In such mundane moments when they turned off the light to go to sleep at night or when they lifted a spoon of cream soup to their mouth and blew on it, they did stop and wonder why the Woman didn't do something about the fly entourage. On the other hand, maybe she was trying so hard to do something this was the minimal amount of flies she could keep from invading her space as a time. Maybe if she did nothing at all, she would be lost inside a cloud of flies and meet an unfortunate end by the hand of a cloud of pest control chemicals. When the cloud cleared and they came back to sweep up the fly carcasses, they would find her bloated body covered in flies, like family weeping over her in still-life, kissing her eyes.

They didn't think about it for long.

Even the strangest things become less so the longer they are a part of your life. They develop a purpose. The woman and the fly entourage were no different. She'd had the flies since she was three years of age and yes, had spent increasing amounts of effort to deter them, until it had consumed her life and there was room for nothing else as a result as she approached the third decade of her life.

That was exactly what the flies could see and why they were the only creatures with the ability to see the gorgeous tragedy she fed they and their winged libidinous love of her now numb irony.