Egg
I went to a support group a while ago. There were flies tapping on their window.
The air was suffocating, a wave of heat sticking to my neck in thin sheets, the smell of ammonia soaking into the skin. Few people attended; long rows of chairs isolated the small group of participants. An old clock ticked on the wall, the small noise of time passing by quietly dissolving through the space. The facilitator was bunching on a chair too tiny for his size. His pupils in his large, bulging, goldfish-like eyes clouded by a dull, grey foam. You’ll have to forgive me, but I wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying.
It took me a long while to recall why I was there. Right, my wife died.
I never could recall how I met my wife. I was born in a decrepit bedroom, grew up in a small town, moved to a remote college, started working soon after. Somewhere along the line she occurred, and before I knew it, I was married. Sometimes, as she strolled around the house, I’d look at her face, and she’d remind me of flies — those little black dots wandering mindlessly across rooms, knocking into every piece of object. How, in summertime, impromptu they surface, and then, all of a sudden, they’ve spread everywhere. How, like cryptids, they emerge and perish out of human perceptions, beyond reach. When you aren’t looking, they live out their lives, wilting away like flowers in the cool November breeze.
Flies are fascinating insects.
Inside the old community center, they were still banging on the window. Their shiny, yellowish bellies flared in the sun as they wiggled on the glass, squirming and dropping, then bursting into flights, futilely thrashing at the invisible barrier. As you’d probably guess, I was riveted to the spot, entranced by the dance of their bodies, the transparent, erratic beats of their wings, the sharp, hardened, sable hairs on their legs. I imprinted their images into my head.
When the session ended, I walked up to the window and grabbed a handful, squeezing their plump bodies tightly in my fist. Their little legs pinched my palm for the entirety of my walk home, quivering in my hand like small, frightened kittens. It was almost disappointing to discover that when I got home, they had already been squashed into a pool of paste: red blood fused with yellow juice, tainted with tattered heads and broken wings. Some of the flies were pregnant; I spotted tiny mounds of rice-white eggs in the crevice of my fingers.
I drank a little afterwards, and when I got comfortable, I pressed my hand to my tongue. The juice tasted bitter, like a metallic acid stinging the inside of my mouth. I smeared the remains onto my window. The brownish filter it created formed light circles on the floor — something so magnificent that I imagine you’d want to see someday for yourself.
Larvae
A few weeks later, on a warm Sunday afternoon, I was visited by a stranger. He reminded me of someone close, someone I couldn’t quite name — a nostalgic face of a million unfamiliar beings coiling in my head.
Without warning, he walked inside. I didn’t stop him. We sat by the table for a while, a musky scent lingered in the air. In silence, we rested until the blue sky drained into a sickly white, then peeling away into a greyish purple, pressing down onto the roof. Eventually, when the silence became too unbearable for both of us, he opened up. In whispers, he told me that he was another me — the future me that never existed, the future me that died with my wife.
That probably confused you. You see, when you lose someone, you lose a part of yourself too — a future you that you’ll never experience. He was the part of me taking her to the lake for anniversary, the part of me pressing my ears on her swelled-up belly, the part of me sitting with her looking after our children, the part of me watching the colors of her hair fade, the part of me holding her hand as she closes her eyes for one last time. All those echoing images of myself faded away with her on the hospital bed.
He didn’t leave that night. Side by side, we lay on the warm wooden floor, our hands tightly intertwined, faces caressed by the gentle wind. I had buried the fly eggs in the ground below the crawlspace of my house, where they will imperceptibly germinate and blossom into beautiful flowers. Inattentively, we listened to the rumbling underneath the floorboards, the rhythmed, quiet tapping of worms wiggling, turning the soil. Drifting on the waves of silent writhing, the house quivered subtly with us.
I imagined her quivering with us, too.
With my eyes half closed, I let go of the man next to me, pulled a blanket over his body, and tucked the edge of the blanket under his folded limbs. It was a mesmerizing experience: the tender, brown fur resting in my hand, sliding through my fingers, then propping down his side, coming together underneath his back. The way it surrounded him, covering him like a mummified cocoon, forever preserved, forever full of life. It was beautiful.
He stayed motionless for the rest of the night; the hardening folds of the blanket gradually hindered the patterned heaving of his chest. Almost telepathically, I watched him dissolve into his shell, melting like sugary caramel. In the morning, I buried the empty husk next to my wife in the yard.
Pupae
For a while, I was overtaken by a powerful sense of longing; it would be hard to describe it to you, to make you feel what I felt. It wasn’t obvious at first, like the first few drops of rain on a gloomy day. But the more I waited, the more it loomed, an overcast seeping into trees and dirt until everything was shrouded in fog. The way I felt it in the peripheral vision of my heart, fresh and certain, like the full moon so wet you could see it drip.
It was a powerful feeling.
The smear on my window had grown, in an infinitesimal manner it stretched into a thin, stained foam. Blooming in the hot summer’s day, the edges spilled into tiny arms, reaching and pulsating from the window ledge. I had latched my front door with several locks; I didn’t want to risk my neighbor knocking and opening the door — that would ruin everything.
Sometimes, I would sit on my wooden chair, gazing for hours at the filtered window; it captured me in a trance. As the sun rose, through the shattered wings, the lights dragged out long, incoherent bubbles on the wall. It reminded me of life. How, like rivers rise into clouds, like wildflowers appear in the crevice of sidewalks, life quietly passed us by.
Sometimes, I would look at pictures of her too; they helped me remember her face. It was hard to tell in which photo she looked thinner. With makeup, she appeared no different than when I first met her, a time and place I couldn’t quite recall. She only looked paler than usual lying in the hospital room. Her hair was falling out, so I bought her a wig. I didn’t know which one to pick and ended up with one styled a bit too tacky for someone her age, but she was okay with that.
She was okay with anything.
There were flies in my house; they drifted like dust in the air, forming an unpierceable cloud, condensing into furniture. It didn’t bother me, though. It didn’t bother me that the moment they caught my eyes, they vanished into inexistence. With perked ears, I listened to the buzzing that reverberated through the house, ringing louder as time flowed by, murmuring, then wailing in a cacophony of vibrations. Multitudes of wings beat maniacally, layer upon layer, flutter upon flutter.
It didn’t bother me, really, if I were to be completely honest. Like I said, I was struck by a feeling of intense longing, stabbing my chest like hot daggers. As you can imagine, it was quite problematic. But for every poison, there’s a remedy. So, to cure my own poison, I’d take out my small stonework hammer and crawl through the open window on the other wall into my yard. There, I would carefully tread to the place where I buried myself, just next to my wife.
Lying on top of my grave, gently, I would take the hammer to my arm, slowly crushing each individual bones, then to the legs, then to the ribcage. The hardest part was always the last arm. As it’s obvious, breaking solid bones using a smashed, crumbled up hand was extremely difficult…but not impossible. Flattened, twisted on the ground, I liked to imagine myself wrapped inside the blanket six feet underneath me, slowly morphing into a newer being — reborn, if that’s how you’d like to call it.
Some time later, the shattered bones and swollen tissue would begin to heal, their misaligned connections resulting in some morbid, unrecognizable form. Still, it never failed to fascinate me when I looked into the mirror. It was like staring into someone new.
Adult
In the end, when I had done it enough times, the wounds stopped healing. I was left with pulverized bones throughout my body, barely able to move. Having been disintegrated for too long, the nerves on my fingertips died, muscles shrinking into a blackish mess. It didn’t bother me, though.
What bothered me was when the flies died. Moved on, if you will. The black, erratic swarm eaten by the hollow space; individuals unraveling from each other, dissolving and decomposing imperceptibly into the air, consumed by the room.
The house was a mute mausoleum, its pulse reduced to a mumble. The foam that originated from the window covered the wall, a moldy membrane of wallpaper reeking of decay.
And I was feeling very, very sick. The type of sickness that slowly eats at you, slowly engulfs you in a formless cloud of despair; the type of sickness that slowly emerges and takes you away. It was suffocating. But it was inevitable. So, I decided to take to the yard one last time.
Dragging my body on all fours across the living room, I climbed through the open window and crawled into the yard. I was driven by a primitive instinct, a megalithic calling that you’d hear when you suddenly wake in the night, overtaken by fear and grief. It felt like that.
Creeping onto the hump in the ground, with my swollen, limp fingers, I dug through the dirt bit by bit, until I was able to see the wooden surface protruding out of the hole.
Wiping away the dirt on her coffin, the lid of the box had cracked, through it a giant, needle-like leg pierced the middle. From the grand split, it pointed at the sky like a delicate flower, fresh out of its bud, blossoming in the cool night breeze.
Retracting into a tensed spring, the leg began thrashing at the coffin, each strike strong, powerful, lively. Piece by piece, the fragments broke off like brittle leaves, giving way to the five other sable legs germinating through. Then, tasting air for the second time in her life, she sighed. Steadily, she rose up, erect before me. Her metallic, green stomach glistened in the moonlight, her translucent wings casted streaks of shadows on my broken body. Under the clear night sky, she looked alive.
When I met the gaze of her warm, mesmerizing eyes, I saw in each tiny grid of the compounded structure a future me — a me bringing her to our new home, a me having a baby with her, a me raising our children, a me watching her get old, a me crying as she passes away. A million echoing faces of me living inside her; a million echoing faces of us living forever.
And it was okay now.
Shaking awake her wings, gently, she took flight; the soft wind she created rustled through my hair. Then, like life itself, she shrunk ever so small into the night sky, until imperceptibly, she went away.
Kneeling on the ground, it took me a long while to recall why I was there. Right, my wife died.
I met her on a summer’s day, it was my first day at college, she was sitting in the same class with me, there were flies tapping on the classroom window. We started talking as friends, then imperceptibly, we went from friends to lovers; when college ended, we got married. She was a happy, regular woman; I was a happy, regular man. After we settled down, though, just as imperceptibly, she began to wither. It took us three weeks to figure out she had pancreatic cancer. On a winter’s night, she died on the bed of the same hospital that diagnosed her; there were flies tapping on the hospital room window.
Like flies on a summer’s day, she emerged invisibly into my life, then like flies in a winter’s night, she exited just as invisibly out of it.
But it’s okay now. It truly is.