Kathy Oltion - Shoo Fly

“Barb, are you coming to bed or what?” Denny’s tired voice called out from the bedroom. He never could fall asleep until she came to bed, too.

“Be right there,” she said. She could feel her heart rate pick up and her breathing quicken, which wasn’t good, considering what it was she was breathing. She dropped the swatter, slapped the lights off and hurried to the shower.

She wasn’t sure how long she’d been standing in the warm water, but it was long enough for her toes to feel wrinkled. There was a knock at the door.

“Yeah?” she asked over the rush of water.

Denny slipped inside and said, “You want a back wash?”

“Sure.”

He slid the shower curtain open just enough to reach inside with one arm. She handed him the soap and turned her back toward him to lather.

“Denny?”

“Yeah?”

She hesitated. How could she ask what was on her mind without sounding crazy? “Promise not to laugh, but it seemed that every time I grabbed the fly swatter tonight, the flies vanished.”

“Well, then use the swatter.” He handed back the soap and rubbed her shoulders.

She leaned into his massage. “That’s not quite what I meant. I didn’t have to even use the swatter. All I had to do was just reach for it. It was like they knew what I was going to do before I did it and they made themselves scarce somehow.”

Denny didn’t say anything to that. He finished his scrubbing and reached into the stream of water to rinse his hand off.

“Denny…?”

He dried his hand on the towel before he looked up at her face and said, “You’re saying they’re psychic?”

“Telepathic, maybe?” she asked back.

“I think you need to get some rest. You worked hard this weekend getting ready for your Aunt Lydia’s visit.” He turned and left.

She was tired all right, but she didn’t think she’d get much sleep.

By the time she got up the next morning, Denny had already left for the office. It was later than she usually slept, but it had been near sunrise when she finally drifted off. Her dreams had been frustrating, as though she were searching for an answer to her problems and they danced just out of her reach.

Just like the flies and her fly-swatter, she thought. As she entered the kitchen, she braced herself for the maddening buzz, but a solitary fly hovered over the sink where Denny had left a used coffee filter to finish dripping.

Maybe the spraying helped after all, she thought. The perfumy stink still hung in the air, so she opened the windows a crack. With a sense of relief, Barb took her first shower of the day.

Once she was clean, she remembered her dirty clothes from last night lying in a heap on the laundry room floor, so she gathered up the rest of the laundry and took it downstairs, too. That was when she discovered where all the flies had gone. They hovered over her clothes like a black cloud. She slammed the door to the laundry room to keep them from escaping to the rest of the house.

She looked around for another swatter, or a newspaper to roll up, but except for the appliances and the clothing, the room was otherwise empty. She noticed that as she was actively looking for a weapon, the flies seemed to decrease in numbers, but the moment she gave up, they returned in force.

What if she thought so hard as to believe that she held a swatter? Would the flies go away? Or were they smart enough to know she was bluffing? Well, she had a captive audience.

She concentrated on the feeling of a fly-swatter handle in her hand; how the rubber-coated loop of wire felt snug in her palm, how her fingers grasped it. She imagined the heft and springiness of the tool, the snap of the thin, webbed plastic slapper when it hit a countertop. She could hear the whish of air as she wielded it against her enemies. She could read the words Plasti-Swat on one side of the molded red plastic and Made in Metropolis, IL on the other. The fly-swatter was real.

Slowly, she opened her senses and brought her attention to the room around her. Her arm was poised to bring down mass destruction upon the invading hordes, but she was alone in the room. She checked the door leading back upstairs, but it was still closed tight. She didn’t know where they went or how they did it and she didn’t care as long as they stayed away from her. She went ahead and loaded up the washing machine, keeping track of where she laid her “swatter.”

Eventually, curiosity overcame her. She took the stairs two at a time and checked the kitchen. No buzzing. She toured the rest of the house. All quiet. She could hardly believe it. One final question nagged at her brain, so she returned to the laundry room and closed the door.

Amid the humming and sloshing of the washing machine, Barb dropped the idea that she held the fly-swatter and instead, imagined a days-old garbage can full of rotting food. The stench of decomposing banana peels and tomato cores about made her gag.

That did it. All around her, the flies were as thick as, well, flies. There was no garbage within fifty feet of the laundry room, and yet the flies were there. If they weren’t clued into her thoughts, she didn’t know how else to explain it.

Once again, Barb held her trusty swatter in her hand, ready to cleanse her world of the black menace, and poof—they were gone. The washing machine ended its cycle and Barb tossed the clean clothes into the drier, then headed to the kitchen for a cup of coffee, and to think about this new-found power.

She sat at the kitchen table, staring out at her backyard through the window. Her smile grew as she realized that she needn’t be bothered by August flies ever again. Summer just got a whole lot more pleasant.

Now, what to do about dear old Aunt Lydia…