I loved a dead fly
I have been in chronic, sometimes debilitating pain off and on for years. The pain is a serpent with moods and seasons, it shifts and hunts and screams in fury.
“Where’s my dead fly?” I yelled as pleasantly as possible, standing in the bathroom door, slightly panicked. Trying not to be more panicked.
“What dead fly?” asked my husband calmly, like this was a normal question.
“The dead fly I keep on the windowsill,” I said.
He then suggested maybe it had fallen off when he tidied up the previous day. He didn’t notice a dead fly in the process. And if he did see it he wouldn’t have known to save it, he said as kindly as a person could, seeing as he hadn’t been aware of its existence. Let alone importance. He offered to help me look for it. Again, like this was a normal thing.
It was already dead when I found it nearly two years ago, legs folded upward on the bathroom counter, classic dead bug posture. It was regular housefly size, maybe slightly smaller, but when I picked it up to throw it away I gasped; its entire body was the most beautiful array of blues I have ever seen. Azure to cyan, a hint of emerald green, aggressively iridescent. I think about colors for a living and I had never seen such perfection. No mineral, no treasure, no museum jewels could approach how gorgeous this fly was. I placed it on the tongue of a ceramic creature our child made in middle school. And there it lived on the window sill. Nearly every morning I looked at the fly, swam in those colors, took a deep breath, and felt good.
