The Winter Fly
by EC Pandzic
“Good grief, who let the fly inside?” Asked mom.
No admission of guilt came from either of the two children. “It’s a big one, mom.”
It was indeed. A big black housefly, nearing the size of a bee and zipping across the room obviously confused by its confinement.
“Yes, that’s a sticky one. We called those winter flies when I was a girl. They come in all fattened up from the summer and spent the winter inside sticking to everything. But they only live like a month or so,” mom explained.
Well, this fly was just that, and too big and noisy to ignore. And for that day and the next, it flew from room to room getting acquainted with its new home. It was more than bothersome as the fly zipped passed one doing homework, another playing and then later as they all watched TV. It rocketed across each room with a buzzing sound almost as loud as a bumble bee. “He sounds like some kind of WWII aircraft about the strafe an encampment. That’s one noisy fly,” commented a frustrated dad. That lasted intermittently day in and day out from breakfast through dusk. Where the fly landed and who the fly chose to stay with during the night became an unpleasant subject over the next morning’s breakfast.
The next evening at dinner, the daughter called out to mom: “The fly was sitting on my food, mom!”
“Yuck,” her brother chimed in unsympathetically. “
“Well, just scrape that part off and eat the rest,” answered mom.
“But I wasn’t watching. It might have been all over my dinner,” the daughter whined.
“Well, back on the ranch, Theo used to hang up a side of beef on the prairie only rubbing salt on it. He said it was the salt and the flies that cured the beef into the jerky they all ate,” mom rationalized to a now grossed-out father, daughter, and son. But the dinner wasn’t going to waste as far as she was concerned.
The next day the fly was noticed bouncing off of the kitchen window as it obviously looked to the garden behind it. “Quick open the window,” the son called out to mom.
Mom did as fast as she could trying not to scare the fly back into the room behind her. “Did he get out?” The son and daughter asked.
“No, he flew the other way. Stupid fly, we’re trying to set you free,” the mother said frustratingly.
So, it was yet another day of this sticky thing intermittently flying around the heads of the family. The kids had given up chasing it with a magazine as the fly never landed someplace noticeable or within reach to swat. Every once in a while though, Dad, rose in anger and chased the fly with villainous intent. But the fly eluded them all. Then, or maybe they were just getting used to it, the fly seemed it was doing less of that.
The next morning mom called out: “Look, I got him.” She opened the wet paper towel in her hand to reveal the now dead big black fly. “He was dead on the windowsill when I got up this morning.”
Each of them looked at the fly, first in satisfaction. Then the daughter said: “That’s kind of sad, poor little fly.”
“Little?! I don’t think so,” mom retorted sarcastically. “And poor fly? Really? Really? I could put him back on the sill and we can see if any little baby flies hatch.”
“No, no, quick, flush him down the toilet,” both the kids answered in unison.
Copyright 2025