Death chases us all. How it follows us at every waking moment, waiting for a mistake or an accident. It lurks in the shadows, it stalks you through your dreams and like two young men on zero hour contracts standing outside Morrisons with clipboards and cheery dispositions, desperate for you to change your energy provider it will never leave you alone.
You would think given how many souls he has now Death would be quite bored with the whole scenario. You really want to throw my bits into the great steaming pot with the billions possibly trillions of others? What do you get from this, Death? Did nobody ever buy you a bike for Christmas? If you’re looking for hobbies, origami is very relaxing (that’s a big lie.)
This is Derek.
We don’t know if that’s his real name because he’s dead. His body was discovered by me a few weeks ago when I was tidying up. Perched upon a picture frame in Reuben’s bedroom, Derek appears to have had a tiny heart attack. He’s not upside-down or smashed into a magazine smear on the window so it must have been natural.
There he stares, with his staring eyes, out across the field. Was it what he saw that caused the trauma or did it happen suddenly, his little light snuffed out without any word of warning? We will never know. For now let us celebrate the brief life of Derek who, by leaving us so early, left the world with one less fucking fly to deal with.
9 comments on “Fly”
Poor Derek. Frozen in time, like a fossil. I hope you’re going to keep him there forever, like a weird fly statue.
I don’t know what else to do with him? In a way he chose to spend his last few moments with me even though it isn’t in my room and I had no idea he was there until he was already gone.
Yes, in a way he did, and in a way that’s very moving.
Perhaps one way to honour him in death would be to hoover him up.
I’m almost tempted to slowly push him out the window. Gently, like a woman’s hankie.
That’s very gentle indeed. What you need to avoid is a push so slow and gentle that he doesn’t make it out of the window. That would be very disrespectful to the fallen.
I’ve done the maths and it would take far too many pounds minutes to sort this so I’m going to have to work out another solution instead.
Would it be wrong to burn it if it’s already dead? *sings* CREMATION!
I think it’s what the fly would have wanted, if it had been capable of wanting anything. The ideal send-off would be to make it a small boat, take it to the seaside and give it a full Viking funeral.
Reading that back due to the limitations of the human eye and the written word, it looks as though I was asking permission to bum the dead fly. Even I am not capable of such brutality.
What you do with this dead fly is up to you, obviously, but for what it’s worth I definitely would not advise you to bum it.