Damien Galeone

It’s Saturday morning around 8 am – a fact evident on the five clocks on various devices in the living room. Otherwise, there’s nothing to suggest it’s morning. The sky is just now going from a pitch-black midnight to a dark, impenetrable, the-rapture-came-and-went-and-you-weren’t-chosen gray. I walked the dog in the middle of the night, or, in technical terms, 7:40 am.

It’s been gray and foggy since mid-November, so this is nothing new. It comes and goes each year like this, though this year does seem particularly glum. There’s the period between early November and mid-January when the daylight allotted the citizens of the Czech Republic does not survive the workday. I have been here before, but it is disconcerting to hear traffic when it seems that everyone should be in bed. It’s as though something has happened and we won’t find out until Dave Bautista and Ron weaselly knock on my door.

Nevertheless, it’s Saturday morning and even though it’s in December we try to do our normal things. The coffee boils. We put something on the TV and chat about the day ahead and the week behind. Today’s plan: do nothing. I have just crawled out of two weeks of extreme busyness, a perfect storm of writing, editing, planning, teaching, and making ESL materials. Everyone needs something in December. It seems to be a rule. Next weekend I have to teach an intensive course all day Saturday, so this weekend I will spend it doing nothing.  

By 11ish, the light has gone from dark gray to neutral gray. It’s quiet. Out of the 7 zillion options on our various streaming sites, I settle on a movie that’s an adapted Roald Dahl story starring Benedict Cumberbatch. I love all of those elements and put it on. However, I soon realize that the film was directed by Wes Anderson, who no longer make movies featuring human people speaking how humans speak. So, in a very short while, I am overcome with the deeply confusing anxiety that can only come from watching a Wes Anderson movie made after 2014. Nowadays, it’s timeless pastels and dialogue which sounds like nobody on the planet earth has ever spoken aloud. This causes something like a reverse epilepsy wrapped in a deep dread.

I give up in twelve and hand the remote over to Burke, who goes for a true crime show that gives me the shivers. I retreat to bed with my book. The book is about a brutal murder in France, but there’s a lot of cheese, so I can deal with the evisceration which starts the book. The dog and the cat follow quickly and embed themselves in the nooks my body parts create. They get cozy. I pretend my bladder doesn’t exist and isn’t fifty years old. It’s around 1 pm, the lightest it’s going to be today and I try to soak it all in.      

Then I hear it. A buzz. Yep. We all hear it. The dog, cat, and I all raise our heads in a prehistoric gesture, then glance at each other as if we’re all figuring out why we’re up here. And up above us, like all flying beings that get into my house, stuck between the window and the blinds, is a fly. He’s big and fat. The dog and cat instantly come alive. The cat takes the high road along my face to my desk to the window sill. She stands a few feet away and plots. The dog is too short to reach the fly and she’s not dexterous enough to follow the cat’s path, so she stands on the bed pillows and observes from a distance.

I get up against my will, heave the covers off me with the grunt of the unwilling. I don’t want to kill the fly; I want the fly to go away. He’s fat and buzzing loudly – hardly conducive to reading about murder in France. He is slow too.

It occurs to me how out of place his buzzing is. It’s as disturbing as the traffic. A fly alive and well-ish in mid-December? Perhaps it’s the gray or the dark or the two weeks of work that have gone by or maybe Wes Anderson and his increasing inability to write how human people speak, but I begin to piece together a story for our fly. First off, he is huge. This suggests he survived because he was larger than the others or by eating the others to get large. Cannibal. Traitor. Lord of the Flies.

But then I soften on him, for he is surely the last man standing. This is a concept that meant nothing to me until I reached my mid-40s. Last man standing. My grandmother lived until 96 and she was part of our family, but of course most of the people she knew had died in the 80s and 90s. It must be an achievement wrought with mixed feelings. You have won, you have beat everyone, but nobody you beat is around to boast to. And this fly, well, I guess he’s the same. All of his friends died a while ago and he’s the last one. He floats around my house, Lord of the Flies, feasting on my kitchen’s neglected offerings – the overripe banana, the whiskey at the bottom of the shot glass, the bountiful garbage. He is fat and fed, but careening towards oblivion.

An oblivion my cat wishes to help him attain. This is evidenced by the thumping of her tail on my computer. I open the window and let the Lord of the Flies out. My balcony windows are all closed, so he drifts to them and then bumps up against those. We all (Me, cat, dog) walk out to the balcony where I open the far window. We watch the Lord bounce and buzz and tap against each window until he reaches the last. We step back and better our posture. Even the cat stops thumping her tail. The Lord hovers in front of the open window, clearly noticing the draft, the coolness, the gray.

He hesitates long enough for me to get the drift. I shut the window, him on the inside. He buzzes around the balcony area and follows us all into the living room. It’s almost 2, and so we have an hour of daylight left. Since it’s almost nighttime, I pour myself a whiskey. Then, remembering my day’s plan, I have one more. I make sure to leave a little in the bottom of the glass and go read more about murder in France in the spring.