Flies at the Window

Yesterday, I drove up to my cabin and constructed the last of the railing along the edge of the loft.  I cranked-up the boombox and rather danced between the air-nailer and miter-saw as I fitted together the various balusters, rails and trim boards.  After about five hours of work, I finished the last remaining section of open deck.

I said #$$@&## only once and #*#% twice.

Not bad—especially when you consider that I like to say #$$@## just for fun when I am all alone.  Sometimes, I whisper it seductively.   At other times, I make it sound like it is riding on a rollercoaster.  On those occasions when I cut the wrong end of a board or drop my pencil while atop my ladder, I sigh loudly and blurt-out the word with great earnest.

Well, I suppose #$$@&## is technically a phrase and not merely a word. 

Just as I started to clean-up my mess for the day, the CD in the player fell silent, having reached the end of the current CD.  I clomped down the stairs, thinking that I might change to a new CD, but somehow flopped into one of my willow rocking chairs instead, listening to the silence.

I should say, mostly silence—except for the flies.  A lot of flies were ticking against the uppermost windows at the end of the loft walkway in a frenzied attempt to escape.  I don’t speak fly, but I am pretty sure they were all screaming #$$@&## repeatedly.

For some reason, I have become quite averse to killing anything.  Just last Saturday I captured two black widows in my garage and trotted them outside so I could live release them on the sage and grass flat.

I decided that I would save the flies by sucking them into the shop-vacuum I was using to draw-up sawdust.  I climbed back to the loft, dragged the vacuum over to the windows, fired up the motor and began sucking the ping-ponging horde of flies down the hose.  Some of the flies resisted mightily, clinging to the glass or the wood casing—their wings drawn-away like a cape in the wind, but the suction of the machine overpowered all of them. 

As soon as I had sucked in the last fly, I shut down the machine and dragged it outside to set the insects free.  I had in my mind a picture of a happy swarm zizzzing up and away as opened the machine to dump the collection.

When I unlatched the top and dumped the contents, a waterfall of sawdust whooshed out and fell into an immobile pile in the grass and wild strawberries.  I watched the pile, waiting for legs and wings to stretch free.  I waited for whole black flies to emerge from the honey-colored sawdust, shake themselves off and launch themselves away into the forest light.

Nothing.

I tentatively stirred the pile with a stick I found nearby.  I waited.

Still Nothing.

Like so many other good intentions…the end result was a pile of dust.

--Mitchell Hegman