Flash Fiction Friday: Honey

by Avichai Brautigam

There is a fly drowning in a puddle of honey on my kitchen table. Why? Because, with full knowledge of what would come of it, I left the golden brown for the catching of flies like this one. Alas, I think my fly… my prisoner… is dying. Buzzing, not quite as loud as a bee’s, yet not as quiet as the vibrator I keep in my bedside table, rises from the fly’s shuddering body. I do not think it will be long now.

The fly has beautiful legs, long and plump, without very much fat… do flies have fat? These legs are much to my liking, terminating in pretty pale pink feet with exquisite toes. I should very much like to kiss along the two gorgeous legs of my benighted friend. Following up from the base of this fly’s feet, I would let my lips travel up towards the round thighs. What a wonderful buttocks! By god, I’ve caught quite the fly!

Diminishing ever further, the buzzing is starting to trickle. I do fear my friendly fellow sufferer shall soon be at its end. Crystalline and ensconcing, the honey does its dread work. Soon it will be done and I, in my own way, will have become death, destroyer of worlds.

Yet my reverie is forever interrupted! Look at the aedeagus on this fly! Who could deny its exquisiteness? The shaft made tumescent by death… leave that one to the psychoanalysts… is no more than six inches, its head mushroom-like. Cut as beautifully as a diamond, too! I wonder who the moyle was? Below sag two bright coral bullocks, which contrast wonderfully with the aforementioned legs, just as enticing… perhaps more so. The navel sports a patch of blond pubic gold… no, I do not misuse that term, I can see it now: Rumpelstiltskin spinning gold thread from the pubis of my dear old fly.

The fly has more joie de vivre than previously supposed. It has, for a few minutes now, denied death another victory. Was it Nietzsche, then, who claimed that hope was the worst of all evils? Siri says yes. I am starting to believe that I should not have been so cruel as to leave my trap. What good has it done, in any case? It was immature of me, for certain.

My eyes are now transfixed upon the fly’s body. The pubic forest trails a while upward, as if the very image of a flame upon the trunk. How pale! How delicate! Its belly button is enough to send one into raptures. On the chest, there is only the hint of hair, a promise which need not be kept. Two rose areolas culminating in a perky-pointed nipple. Sublime. I could spend a year on each. Its back is lined with small spinal bumps. My breath catches.

What is the worst a fly can do? I dare say little at all. Surely there must be a more logical reason for the way we treated the besotted creatures, who, after all, do us a favor. Correct? The state dieticians and experts…those oddly buzzing bunch of bureaucrats who hand down diktats like bubble gum… are always telling us to eat less sugar, to not waste food, and so on. Who but flies would punish us, disincentivize us? Surely, being good Americans, we would balk at the State setting ordinances on what we eat! I say, god bless the flies!

The arms of my fly are perfectly formed, a light slab of fat undergirded by barely apparent muscle. Flexible fingers, the sort needed to enter orifices and to plumb depths. Manicured nails of the proper shape, not too wide and flat… I despise how wide and flat the nail of others are. No signs of having bit at them are apparent.

Hell, flies do god’s work! Certainly, there are references in the Tanakh! Isn’t there a story of that sort somewhere… I cannot fathom the hubris of my fellow humans. Am I to be but a bystander to this… this murder? Yes. That’s what it is: a damnable homicide. A sin. I would not have been in this situation, I think, but for my boyfriend, who decided that “something” needed to be done about “all these flies”! He would have had me in the camps, the bastard… no concern at all for the sanctity of life.

Under the honey, the fly’s face is becoming clearer. Pale, with brown eyes and an aristocratic nose, a golden brow, and rouged cheeks. A holy androgyne, something like Donatello’s David, with thick golden hair…though not as long as the statue’s.

I will not be a handmaiden to death.

I grab the fly from the honey puddle, screaming for its… his… life. I am praying now. Praying like I haven’t since I last stepped foot inside a synagogue. I’m crying for my fly’s life. I have forgotten how to cry, how to pray, yet I relearn these skills at the very moment when I have found a fly.

Manna descends from heaven.

He opens his honey-covered mouth. There is a shuddering as breath… life!… moves through him, into his lungs. A few moments of hyperventilation, then calm as his breathing steadies. Looking about the room, he sees. First, he brings his hands near his face. Then he sets them down so as to look at me. As the last of the gears rattle in his head, he blushes. You must pardon me, he says, I try not to appear nude before strangers. I tell him it is all okay and that he is god’s blessing unto me. This confuses him, but he has recovered his dignity. He introduces himself for the first time. His name is Remy… he’s French in origin… I offer him coffee, which he takes with a great deal of sugar. We are on speaking terms, becoming friendlier, and before long we are in my bedroom…I have joined him in his nudity.

That evening, I tell my boyfriend to get lost.

*****

Many months later, I am eating dinner with Remy: steak. He spitting on his steak, well done and covered in ketchup, with his proboscis. All throughout the house are flies. Swarms of flies, perching everywhere as if the building was itself a corpse covered in them. One cannot step anywhere without killing a patch of fat gray ones. How cheap life becomes in its multitude! Remy is eyeing me with obvious desire… or at least, as much as a compound eye can make clear. Tonight, his aedeagus will fill me with his seed and I will birth.

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Avichai Brautigam is a philosophy major and a local of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In his free time, he writes fiction and talks of Marx with friends. You can find him on Twitter.

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