Wicked Prompts

FLY LIES

Farrell went to live in the small town on the edge of the hills, the foothills of larger mountains behind them, in a wrinkled house with crumbs and left-overs, rotting wood, stone tables and trees that shaded now, but promised to smother later.

He was retreating, which was strategic, versus escaping, which meant he'd be back on the attack someday. It was relaxing listening to the birds tweet, the woodpeckers hammering away on a trunk, and butterflies flicker about among the begonias and wildflowers.

He drank coffee and ate baked bread with the locals, which included large black army ants that fell from a vine canopy, and water beetles who visited after the sun fell, and bedridden recluses that burrowed under your skin on dark lonely nights, just cold enough to need the rancid tattered sheets he found there. He tried their language, which warmed them to him at first, but his face paled and was overused by the third week.

He had been there before he felt, though he had no memories of it. Flies buzzed his ears at all hours and he shew'd them away at first. He noticed a town man sitting outside with a beer who let them land on his table, on the edge of his frosty mug, on his arms and even his face, without so much as a twitch.

Farrell ate porridge one morning with thick black raisons he initially mistook for the flies. They were the big horse flies, as large as a thumbnail, meaty and reddish brown, with a vibrating hum that sounded like a drill, and persistent flybys that made lesser men duck their heads.

He bit into a raison and felt a bony crunch, like the skeleton of a sardine, but with the rancid taste of rotting cheese. He spit it out onto the table and dissected it with his knife. Tiny wires and chips strung together beneath its skin, sparking a blue fiery glow, while it crackled like static charged linen fresh from the dryer.

They had been sent to follow him, he knew for certain, but it wasn't what they saw that bothered him. He was only there to rest, but the flies whispered things from their nest, that he could never know.

They waited on the table, their greedy palms rubbing together as if over a potion, plotting something sinister, while their massive eyes scoped dismay, their feet fresh from the pie of fecal dough left by goats along the other fence, foretelling something treacherous.

Farrell knew there were other eyes on other continents that had seen him do much worse. There were memories of his own, of limbs and thighs, and faces, in every size, expression's empty and mouths agape with "why's," that he could never answer.

He'd buried them beneath mounds of dirt and circling flies.