‘FLY GUY’ — a short story

Just like a human, she said giving me a long look, you sucked that up just like a human. I’d only lifted my head for a moment, to let the food go down, check out the company, that sort of thing. There was a real nice vibe too; couple of diners either side of me supping up the feast, nobody crowding anyone out, plenty to go round. A light breeze from an open window was making the sweet aroma of rotting flesh swirl around my head until I was almost crazy with it. I was already thinking things don’t get much better than this when I lifted my head and saw her there taking a break, sitting back and combing through her antennae in a kind of leisurely fashion. She had these long shapely legs, and something about the way she stroked them against each other, then smoothed a foreleg over her head really got my juices going. Even the sun would have been blinded, I can tell you. And she was checking me out with these beautiful, glinting compound eyes of hers like she was really into me. I tilted my head to give her my best angle, and flicked a wing in her direction; a little flirtatious-like. I was just trying to think of the right chat-up line, when these words come out of her mouth; just like a human. She made it sound casual, like she was joking; but those words really stung me

Up until then, the day had been shaping up sweet as a dung heap. I’d got in the night before through a broken window pane. Was in a deep sleep in a fold of the curtains when the sun woke me up, heat building fast even though it was still early. Straight off I noticed something in the air, tickling my taste buds, right there in the very same room. That was a good start; like an omen or something. A glass with just the smallest dribble of some kind of protein shake, there on the table. I moved pretty smart I can tell you. Doesn’t do to leave that sort of thing hanging around for the competition. How I missed it the night before before I’ve no idea. Anyway, I was working my way round the inside of the glass, sucking it all up when this bluebottle blunders through the door, all full of himself, and lands on the outside of the glass. He looks at me a little strange, then belches just to make sure I’ve noticed him. Don’t waste your time here, he tells me, there’s a real feast upstairs, just beginning; enough to go on for weeks. It’ll bring the crowds in, you mark my words, he says, things are getting started already.

Sure enough, when I get there, the place is buzzing. Everything goes off quickly in this heat and the smell was killing me. So tasty my juices were doing the loop the loop the moment I was through the door. Flies all over the place. Crawling, tasting, cruising. I move in to get my share. Checked it out with my feet first of course. Then muscled a few diners out of the way, and siphoned up as much as I could. This was some quality flesh. A human lying on the bed, bit skinny of course, but still, first class compared to a lot of what you get nowadays. Dead for some time too, judging by the state of him. I’d loaded up on the best meal I’d had in ages and was just hanging, thinking about whether I could make space for a second helping when she had to go and knock me off my high like that. Just like a human, the words kept repeating in my head. Why’d she have to go and point out I was different. Can’t help being a bit slow on the suction; don’t have a regular mouth.

I turned away so she wouldn’t notice she’d got to me. Rustled my wings a bit, then smoothed them down with a hind-leg as if it didn’t matter. Don’t want to be associated with those losers. No good if anyone else gets to hear that either. Doesn’t take long before some dumb fly starts going on about freaks. Then before you know it they’re pushing you around, calling in all the other dumb flies in the vicinity, getting all heavy like they’re going to rough you up. Sure enough, soon as she’d said it, a couple of heads lift from the food and turn my way. I heard someone mutter fuck-up lab-fly. I decide now is a good time to take a break, and buzz-off up to the ceiling.

There are a couple of other flies here, digesting their food, and they don’t seem to have heard so I decide to hang for a while; watch the others, down below, return to filling their bellies. I pick my way round the peeling surface watching out for signs of spiders; there’s a small one in the corner but I figure he’s too puny to cause me that much trouble.

This lab fuck-up story never goes away. They say flies like me are an experiment gone wrong, something that happened a long time ago. When flies are hanging out of an evening, winding each other up to pass the time, stories get told. Dumb stories that don’t make a lot of sense to me; but I’ve heard this same tale too often now, enough times to think there must be something in it. The way the story goes is something like this; a man attempts to make a time machine, something to do with DNA transfer, although nobody’s yet been able to explain to me what DNA transfer means. Anyway, a fly gets into this time travelling DNA transfer machine, they do their experiment and this poor sucker gets tangled up with a human body. Ever since then, there’ve been mixed up flies like me; fuckups, freaks they call us.

Kind of a weird story I know. Don’t like to think about it too often. Makes me start to doubt myself. Am I fly or human? Have to be careful not to make it too obvious when other flies are about too. We get picked on sometimes; gets me down. Always feeling like you don’t fit in; like you’ve got something to be ashamed of, something to hide. It’s not just that we don’t suck so well, we can’t fly so fast, don’t have the full compound eye either, so not so quick to spot movement; bit vulnerable that way. Not as vulnerable as the full human though. That’s the worst thing about being associated with them. Such losers; can you imagine being the cause of your own downfall, how dumb is that. Older flies always say there are more humans dying now than when they were young, and they remember their parents saying the same thing, and their grandparents saying the same, and so on, and so forth as far back as anyone can remember. As I said, these humans are losers.

So I’m just turning all this over whilst I’m cleaning my legs, rubbing one against the other. That’s me, always grooming; like to keep up certain standards. I’m miles away, in my own thoughts, when a couple of other flies come in to land either side of me. I recognise one of them as the idiot that called me a fuck-up lab-fly earlier. You can just buzz-off right now, he says, you’re not welcome here. He’s not particularly original this guy. Then he fans his wings out to look a bit larger. Not the smartest in the room either. There’s no need to get like that, I say, there’s plenty to go round. That’s not what I meant, he says. There’s a couple more flies coming into land around us now. I’m starting to feel a bit more uncomfortable. I can see there’s no way I’m going to talk him out of this. More flies are lifting off from the carcass below and heading our way. Next thing I know, he’s squaring up in front of me, then he rears up on his back legs. I’m ready for him though; I’m up a split second after him. My wings are going like crazy to give me the force to push against him, but his wings are faster still. Now he has me in a head lock and he’s strong. We stagger to one side and he’s trying to flip me over. The other flies are rattling their wings, it’s obvious whose side they’re on. I’m completely outnumbered. I manage an extra fierce wing flurry to help me rebalance, stop him flipping me, and somehow manage to wriggle backwards out of the headlock. We circle round each other looking for an opening. I manage to get my breath back momentarily, but the flies watching us have got into a kind of rhythm now, flapping their wings to a slow beat, a kind of ominous booming sound. They clearly want to see me get a thrashing.

Seeing an opportunity I dart forward; his reaction times are so quick he simply steps out of the way. You pathetic waste of space, he says, you’re nothing, a deviant science fuck-up. You’re sub-fly, filth, nothing but a fly-guy; he spits out the words like they make his mouth dirty. I can see the others sniggering behind him. I’m stumped for a moment, trying to think of a particularly barbed put-down, then before I can stop it, this rage comes from nowhere. Maybe I’ve been kidding myself, trying so hard to be civilised, to rise above the taunts. I’m shaking with this urge to smash him to a pulp. I put my head down and charge straight at him. Not a typical fly move; maybe that worked in my favour, seemed as if I caught him by surprise. There’s a strange sound coming out of my mouth, a sort of strangled roar. Then our heads meet with a dull crunch. He staggers back, dumb incomprehension on his face. I’m almost as surprised as he is, but realising this is my chance, I dive under his left side and push up fast. There's a gasp, then a thud as he tips over onto his back. He lies there, all six legs waving pathetically in the air. The other flies go silent.

I’m trying to take in what I’ve done. For a moment I’m feeling rather pleased with myself, but it doesn’t last long. What if they all turn on me now? I’m scanning the assembled flies trying to figure out which way this is going to go. What if this is about to make things a lot worse. Just then I notice the lady fly with the shapely legs. She’s there at the back of the crowd, but unlike all the others, she’s not staring at the idiot fly still trying to get back on his feet, she’s not glaring at me either, she’s jerking her head towards the fireplace. Then she lifts off and heads in that direction, looking back over her shoulder. I’m a bit confused for a moment, thought she didn’t like me, but now she seems to be giving me different signals. So I take off and follow her. Luckily the other flies are now too busy helping the big guy up.

I hover at the entrance for moment; it’s so dark up there, not to mention that strange smell, but what choice have I got. I make my way up, blundering into walls and dislodging flakes of soot as I go. I can tell she’s above me somewhere. I hear the buzz of her wings and a scattering of the black stuff hits me hard in the face; I have to land a moment to run a leg over my face and clear my eyes. It seems like an age before I see a glimpse of light up ahead, but that lifts my spirits a little, maybe this will work out after all. I can’t hear anyone following me, but every now and again I catch sight of her silhouette against the circle of sky growing larger above my head.

When I finally reach the top, she’s already sitting there on the rim of the chimneypot. What took you so long, she says. I can see myself reflected a thousand times in those wondrous eyes of hers. She raises a wing and flutters it slightly. I can be a bit slow on the uptake sometimes, but that is definitely a come on. I just couldn’t figure what had made her change her mind. Why did you help me back there, I ask. She opens her wings up and flys over to sit next to me. I’m sorry, she says, I guess I hurt your feelings earlier, but there’s no need to be so sensitive about it. Not everyone thinks being a fly-guy is such a bad thing you know. Look at me, she goes on, what do you think I am? I tried to hide a smile. As I said, she was a looker.

No, I don’t mean that, she said, do you think I’m a regular fly? Now that she mentioned it, there were a few things that were different about her. She was bigger than the typical fly for a start, almost as big as me. And those beautiful compound eyes seemed to look directly my way as if they were really focussing, rather than just looking for quick movements. The more I thought about it the more came to mind; hadn’t her wing beats been a bit slower when I saw her silhouette? She wasn’t as jumpy as your average fly either. But what should have been staring me in the face from the beginning was the fact we were having this kind of conversation at all; where not everything gets said, where she’s reading between the lines. Not many flies manage that.

You mean you, you…I stuttered, I could’t even say it. Yes, she said, you’re not the only one. Of course I knew I wasn’t, but not everyone likes to come right out and say it. I’ve been trying to hide it for years. You shouldn’t be ashamed, she says, you should be proud, I am. Just because flies have a few physical advantages, doesn’t mean they’re better than us.

It felt as if her words were turning the world upside down. And it wasn’t just the world that was changing, I felt different too; my head lifting a little higher all by itself. I looked out over the rooftops into the distance where I could see sun-scorched hills and the charred remains of trees. Then I looked down to the street below, or what was left of it. We were at the top of what had once been a hill. Now the tarmac and the rows of houses descended gradually into the sea until nothing but a row of satellite dishes signalled what what lay beneath the surface. Beyond that was a great expanse of shimmering water. It really was very quiet. I’d been told this was once a prosperous town. She was right really, humans had achieved a lot, even if in the end it hadn’t worked out so well.

Don’t you think it’s just possible we’re the best of both, she said, that we could combine the best parts of humans and flies? I tried to imagine what that might be. What we need to do is stop hiding, she said, you remember the story of how we were came about, don’t you? I nodded and mumbled something about time travel machines. Well, she said, already we are nothing like that first fly-human, they say he had a whole human arm. Imagine that. Admittedly that must have looked a but strange, but with each new generation, as flies mate with hybrids, our human inheritance is being diluted. The more we avoid each other because we’re ashamed, the more this will happen. All of us flyhuman hybrids need to find each other. All the flyguys and flygirls need to recognise that we are unique, and being different makes us special. We gain strength from each other when we recognise this. There’s strength in numbers too; one obvious way we do that is to multiply. That way we don’t disappear at least. That way our numbers grow until we are recognised for what we truly are. We’ll show the flies that we are better than anything that has come before. A new fly-human hybrid with the agility, reaction times and adaptability of the fly and the intelligence of the human.

I could see she was really fired up about this. Full of passion and conviction, like this was going to be the beginning of a new era or something. I turned it over for a while. Her way of looking at things was so different. If I put aside the issue about being dumb enough to self-destruct, I could see her point; humans had after all been able to dominate other species, make all manner of strange products, and change the face of the planet beyond recognition. So I get the bit about the intelligence, I said, but what other desirable aspects have we inherited from humans? She’d been looking beautiful, glowing with excitement up until this point but now all the energy seemed to drain from her face as if I’d sucked it right out of her. Hmmm, she said, maybe it’s hard for us to know what that might be. We both fell silent for a while. I’ve not really seen many live humans in my lifetime, she said, have you? I shook my head. The only time I’d seen more than one in the same place, they’d been fighting over some kind of vegetable one of them had found in an abandoned garden. I felt really bad now, seemed like I’d spoiled her grand plan with my stupid question.

She started running her forelegs quickly over her head and rubbing her hind-legs together, grooming herself obsessively. I could tell she was thinking it over, trying to puzzle it out; every now and again she would hesitate as if she had just had an idea, then carry on again as if realising it wasn’t the answer. All I could think about were those shapely legs. Eventually, even with the distraction of that image buzzing around in my head, an idea came to me.

Maybe it doesn’t matter, I said, so what if there aren’t any more obvious positives about humans. Maybe we should accept that intelligence is not too bad a legacy from our human side and focus on how that combines with the positives about flies. She’d almost worked herself into a kind of meditative state with all that grooming, but now she stopped and turned to look at me. The sun was lower in the sky now; her whole body bathed in a warm light, and her eyes were as dazzling as a glitter ball.

OK, so flies can’t build houses, go shopping, or drive cars, I said, they can’t read or write, use technology or hold tools, but trust me, flies are going to survive where humans can’t. You know why that is? There are two things you have to remember about flies; the first thing our fly side has over humans, is that we don’t kill things, or make things die in other ways. Simple as that; we don’t kill other animals for food, hunt them into the ground, or destroy their natural habitat so they become extinct. And we can turn these human mistakes to our advantage; we live off dead things after all. Now that’s a survival strategy. When everything else seems to be dying we have all the food we want. This makes us the natural successors to humans. I gave her a moment to take that in, I could see she was impressed, then I continued.

You know what our other survival strategy is, I said, the biggest single reason why our fly relations are doing OK where humans aren’t? I paused a moment for dramatic effect. This time I was the one with the stirring speech, the one with the passion. She looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. This was my big moment. I had her full attention. Our survival strategy, I said, is that we breed like crazy. With a few hundred eggs at one go there’s enough in every batch that some are always going to make it. And you know what, us fly-guys and fly-girls being freaks might even help; our fly side makes hundreds of babies and our human side makes them smart enough to get by. You’re right, with the best of both we can be better than either; better than flies or humans. Doesn’t matter if they mock us, doesn’t matter if they call us the worst things they can think of, can’t change a thing, we’re here to stay. We’re going to be the best survivors of all. Between us, you and me fly-girl, we’re the future.

Boom! It was the best chat-up line in history. There was no time like the present so I was on her back before you could say DNA transfer. For the next two hours we were all over the place making babies. Seemed like the day was turning out sweet as a dung heap after all.