The Murder of a Fly

Out of a deep and comforting repose I was awoken by the vexatious buzzing of a winged vermin that I, blinded by the darkenss of my bedchamber, was impuissant in my ability to see. This occurred every night for a month despite it being January when no insect of the kind should have been amongst the living. Yet, somehow — somehow — this creature was very much alive and pestered me so that I could not attain a restful sleep. 

I was disturbed from my gemütlich dreams of the girl I once loved who was stolen from me by an untimely death, and this fact, this gross interruption of our long-overdue respite, created a most egregious antipathy inside of me for this noxious and unwelcomed pest. I swatted my arms and hands as though they were skilled in the deathly art of murder, but I failed. How difficult must it be to kill such a small thing, I pondered. The insect, aided by the veil of darkness, escaped me, zipping about the cold vapors of the room. 

My wife stirred awake as I flailed in my choler with great annoyance that I had awoken her as the fly had awoken me. She absolved the insect of its obvious guilt and became my accuser, daring to pin the malfeasance upon me, likely that she knew the subject of my dream and, thus, the cause of my ire. Somehow she managed to spy upon me in my unconscious state and perhaps she had sent the fly to awaken me herself, summoned it as a witch summons dark spirits to haunt the happily living.

She wouldn't dare awaken me herself when I dreamt of my sweet Fleur. It was by default that I married her some ten years before, shortly after the death of my beloved, which led to the culling of my senses and left me in a lifeless state of apathy. I was then born a man devoid of passion and purged of any capacity to love anything, so I married her in a practical stupor, hoping to maintian the tradition that was expected of me. I wanted a child that I could I love as I once loved Fleur, in a way. But my wife was barren and much less a person for it. A useless thing no better than an overgrown insect. A roach that feeds off me and gives no comfort. 

Heartbreak isn't a reason to go unmarried, my brother counseled me. But it was the wife he introduced me to and endorsed that benefited from that death, and now she agrees with the fly that has disturbed the sleep that ferries me so peaceably to my lost lover. She is a brutally jealous behemoth. A cold and callous wretch that has brought to me only anguish and strife. 

The fly seemed to have been angered by my attempt to swat it as it came back and loudly buzzed my ear as I returned to bed in hopes to recall the dream as though it were a book and I had simply left a mark in its tender pages and could slide easily back in. But this obdurate fly zipped by my ear as though vexed by something I had done to it and as though it was determined to harm me in some consequential way — as though it was I who was in the wrong, guilty of some absurd and unpardonable crime against it! 

And my wife snored like a beast, already back to sleep, as though nothing was lost after she aired her annoyance. As though she were not piqued by the pestiferous fly with its irksome buzzing that was now angrier that I dared yet again to oppose it. That I dared to sleep and dream of more beautiful things from long ago when I was a true man of enterprise and feeling. Dreams of tenderness, true love, and hope, bereft. Washed away. Stolen by this scoundrel. 

How could she sleep so soundly in this cold January bedchamber at all, much less amongst the plaguy flies invading our home to defile our lives and make theirs what is ours, though they've worked not for it. What plagues they've begotten, these horrible insects, these porters of disease and death. What God has created them? For what purpose does the vermin serve other than to spread disease? What a wonderful world it would be without being bitten and stung and poisoned by these vitriolic annoyances that have neither a conscience or a mind capable of anything worthwhile or the realization of a purpose. Or a God. My one grievance of God are they. 

Their bodies crawling with insecticolous mites and puss seeping from their exoskeletons, engaging in cannibalism and infanticide. Under magnification, their true horror is only then exposed. Their existence is vomitous. Despite my wife's opposition and desire to sleep, for the fly bothered her not, I was intent to justly murder this fly for its grievous offense, and so I lit the lamp and gathered a fire iron to strike it. 

And though my wife woke and nagged, put out the lamp, I refused and I swung it wildly in our shadowy bedchamber in search of that ominous fly that flew madly about, seeming to understand as to why I held the lamp in one hand and the fire iron in another, and seeming to stiffen its resolve against me, mocking me with its unwearying droning, flying close to my ear and then away faster than I could draw that cold iron to strike him. 

"Put out the lamp!" she shrieked once more in her foul conspiracy with the fly. She wanted the diseased pest to ruin my dreams of Fleur and for me to resign myself to the misery I knew as her husband. The provider that I was of finer things for which she enjoyed all too much. This corpulent caitiff that burrowed in the black satin hole of our bed more often than she did not. Her fat feet foreign to the floor for their master's grotesque love of languor. She that was a festering thorn in my soul. How opposite she was of my dear Fleur. Absent affection and devoid of love. This vile and disgusting creature that she became only after we were married as though satisfied that she had me ensnared. She that empathetically claimed to be the salve of my heartbroken wound, only to reveal herself to be a torturous finger in the hole of my heart.

The fly buzzed me again and I sprung out of the bed and struck the bedpost so hard the hook of the fire iron stuck in it. It took considerable effort for me to free it. I was quite certain though that I struck the fly in my effort as I heard not its sinister voice in the immediate aftermath. I finally had the silence for which I yearned. Even my wife was silent.

Yet, my joy was short-lived. My wife opened her mouth and what came from this monster was too shrill to be human. She croaked and puled and wailed in such a pathetic and demonic way that I knew her to be the source of all the evil that was in the room. Her eyes I could see in the lamp I hung from the hook that swung wildly from the force of my blow were white as milk with not a pupil or an iris or the fleck of color to be seen in either. Then she grabbed the bedsheets and her back arched as though something inside of her was eating her from within, the demon she possessed which long-since tormented me now sought to be released to confront me, finally in its true form. 

And from the ghastly mouth of this vile woman I no longer knew, which was agape and cantillating satanic verses, came the flies. A horde of flies. A swarm that overcame me. There wasn't an inch of my skin that wasn't covered and bitten. My eyelids. My nostrils. My ears. They crawled through my lips and tickled my throat until I coughed them up which only allowed more to enter through my gasping mouth. I was choking. They seemed to want to consume me from the inside and they were of one mind. The mind of my vile and heaving wife. 

This wasn't the first time she had acted this strange way. The doctor blamed it on some reoccuring malady — a term for which he had at the ready and had taken from a medical journal. But he was mistaken, for she was bewitched, and I knew I had to destroy her. What choice had I in the matter? It was logical and not madness and it withstood all reasonable scrutiny. Even if I loved her — even if she was my dearest Fleur — in order to survive I had to to kill her. What public inquiry in the world would not understand? What would they do in such a desperate state that I found myself in — opposing a woman vomitting flies. She wasn't my wife anymore. She was the host of some sort of parasitic demon. And so, blinded by the flies, I swung the poker until I struck her, until she shrieked out in pain trying to deceive me with appeals for sympathy as though I knew not that she was accursed. 

And like it had been in the bedpost, the hook stuck and took considerable effort to remove from her skull. Again and again, I blindly swung and mashed her body, breaking bones, and tearing flesh in the darkness for the lamp had fallen and was extinguished. Again. And again. And again. I couldn't feel anything besides the flies biting my flesh. Burrowing into my ears and nostrils. But occasionally, there was the sound of breaking bones through their angry humming. A fractured skull. A shattered femur. Then teeth from her mouth falling onto the floor like a string of broken pearls. Tit. Tit. Tit-tit-tit-tit. Then there was a steady pouring of warm blood onto the cold floorboards which I stepped in with a barefoot.

The flies took leave of me and returned to their pulverized queen. My wife who was a bloody pulp of mass, no longer recognizable, lied there in her sick and wretched form. And those flies covered her like a blanket until they with great congruity disappeared into her open mouth which then closed as though the last fly had purposefully shut it. And I dropped the fire iron and climbed into bed beside her so that I might sleep before the dawn because it is terribly uncivilized to sleep between dawn and dusk and I had obligations at my office greater than my desires. 

I was victorious. No more sound! No more noise! And I closed my eyes and slept as I hadn't slept in years. Since I knew Fleur. I dreamt of her. Of her lilac breath and pure white skin that was unblemished. We were again by the pond watching the swans under the privacy of green willow vines that concealed us like swaying curtains from other romantic couples and children with wondering eyes who strolled the banks fishing or watching the same swans, clouds, and sunsets. They were chasing the same dreams. Butterflies fluttered about her face and she sniffed an orchid I had brought for her. A dragonfly flew by her and then playfully skimmed off the water. I could not have known that it would all be so fleeting. 

This was our spot in the shade and with the privacy afforded us we stroked each other and kissed until the conclusion was drawn that no greater satisfaction could be had until we married. We had pushed the boundary for the unwed and she would not afford me another inch of skin or more tender a kiss "until to-morrow," as she said. To-morrow, that bothersome word that was once as great as Heaven to me, full of hope and promise, until it was dried up and served only as a reminder of what would never be and of the cruel and sudden death that robbed me of all my hopes and dreams. That had plunged it's cold and wicked hand deep in my heart and stole from it all of the love that was once so abundantly there. That mulcted me of my sanity and ruined me, forevermore.

But I dreamt and I dreamt and nothing could steal me away from her again until days later I knew I must do something about the body that lied there still rotting. Even in death she interrupted my happiness, that acquisitive hag. So I dragged her broken sack of bones that was oozing blood and fluids, no longer human in form, just a mass of pungent death, an emulsified crimson pulp, from the bed to the yard. But the yard was frozen so I had to drag her into the cellar where I dug and dug and dug until a hole of adequate proportion was had. I shoved her headlong into it, enshrouded in those black satin sheets until the hole consumed her. I had not dug far enough to properly return her soul to hell, but the impromptu grave would do and even without the dirt replaced, she appeared not as she was cloaked marvelously in the disguise of those sheets. It simply looked like a black hole. I shoveled the dirt in and leveled it in such a delicate way it would not be obvious to even the keenest of eyes that beneath the surface was this vile ghastly woman I had so brutally divorced.

All I wanted was to sleep. To not be disturbed anymore by petty convulsions of life and meaningless duty and senseless obligations, all of which I bear like a lead gown. To avoid the cumbersome doldrums of everyday living and a wife I never wanted. For fourteen days I lived in peace, slept in peace, and dreamt of Fleur and courted her again, but this time in the freedom of my sleep, unburdened by life itself in unbridled unconscience bliss. I took morphine to sleep and drank laudanum. I lost weight and began to appear gaunt and sickly. Deformed, one might say of it. But I cared not for how others saw me. I cared only for how Fleur saw me in our dreams. 

I was happy until my happiness was interrupted by a most persistent rapping upon my door. That which could not be mistaken for anything other than an over-eager solicitor or a meddlesome police inspector. Much to my dismay, it proved to be the latter. How I wished once in my life for a solicitor. Someone selling something I could easily turn away. Or one of those religious fellows to ask me if I wanted to talk about my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ armed with literature for me to peruse at my leisure. Yes, young man. Come in and have some tea. 

But the stern fellow with the broad mustache and brick forehead who darkened my door was interested not in tea or my salvation, rather, he was interested in my condemnation by way of the whereabouts of Mrs. Henrietta Blume. 

He said "Blume" in such a way that it seemed foreign to me, though it was my own last name. And to hear the name Henrietta spoken accosted my ears in such an irksome way that my face must have offered him the appearance of repugnance. 

"I haven't received word from her since she departed for Hamburg to visit her mother." I lied calmly. "But do come in, gentleman." 

The inspector said his name was Probst and his demeanor was so grave that I hardly noticed the other person, Herr Hendrich, who seemed like Probst's inadequate shadow. He made me feel uncomfortable, but I managed. I explained my lethargic and sickly appearance and corresponding behavior in that I had been ill, which I had. Very sorrowfully ill, though I am sure they were to assume I meant emotionally distraught because of the disappearance of my wife. 

My most sincere regret is that I lived ten long years without Fleur. That I, in my broken condition, somehow managed to flounder on and married someone that was not her in any conceivable way. Someone that I could not have ever fooled myself was her, even in the darkest of nights or the most desperate of times. Someone that I never could have loved, though I lied upon the name of God that I did and would forever.

They searched over the house, per custom, and I quickly learned that Herr Heindrich was the intellectual of the two and Probst was simply his obsequious partner, little more than a well-trained, oversized dog with a growl and an uncertain bite. Heinrich asked me several times when I saw my wife last and I remarked, in truth, two weeks past. I did not, however, tell him how I disposed of her gelatinous remains in the cellar. Or that she had turned into a demon and beget a horde of a thousand flies that attacked me mercilessly in the dead of January and had antagonized me for weeks prior until that one fateful evening when I snapped. I knew not to attempt to justify my actions to a policeman, but rather wait for the jury or a judge, should they come. 

They indeed had a look in the cellar and Probst admired the house and cellar in the boyish way a simple man covets material things, but Heinrich acted as though there was nothing impressive about my home besides the lack of an apparent body he sought to find. He was not interested in the wine, art, crystal glasses, or my furnishings. And he stood directly above the spot where my wife was buried and looked about the wood beams contorting his face in an inquisitive manor. I did not panic as he stood there, rather, I felt an overwhelming sense of calm rush through me. 

Then, satisfied, he nodded his head and Probst led us out of the cellar and back up the iron stairwell to the house and they put on their hats and gloves to depart. Their spirits seemed far more jovial in that they hadn't found her. Heinrich mentioned something of phoning a colleague in Hamburg as a favor and lipped a curt goodbye when the thing appeared out of the floorboard. "The thing," I say so inadequately. I stared into the distance through a window glazed with ice, but that infernal buzz once more ruined my peace and purloined my sanity. The pest had returned from its chthonic cradle, out of the dirt of the cellar.

I had just envisioned Fleur in my trance looking at the ice and I clutched my ears and shrieked as the fly made its way noticeably between us. Between her and I. And between me and the investigators who stepped back inside the door to witness the curious spectacle, not of the fly that they had not noticed, but of me. The madness that overtook me. My mouth opened and from it, like the flies once from my convulsing wife, came words — loud, excited, and incriminating words. 

"Put out the lamp! Put out the lamp! You wretched accursed woman! I'll put you out! You and your diseased flying horde! Take leave of me! Go back to hell and burden me no longer! Give me sleep! Sleep! Sleep! Wonderful sleep. Let me dream of my Fleur! Leave us, woman!"

"He's mad!" Probst proclaimed. It was then that Probst proved his value. He apprehended me, and in the clamps of his clenched hands I could move not an inch. Two more flies crawled out of the floorboards and taunted me. The inspectors noticed them and they drug me down the iron steps to the cellar where they ascertained the source of the infestation. The flies were crawling out of the dirt one by one. Heinrich bent down and cupped a handful of earth and let it sift through his steady fingers. He then smelled and remarked of the putrid odor.

"I'll be damned," Probst remarked standing beside him.

I began to laugh. Maniacally. It was absurd, after all! The two men swatted the flies from their very faces and took leave of the room, Probst dragging me along like a ragdoll. They didn't bother to dig for they realized the source of the faint odor. They knew what a body smelled like in their line of work. They knew well that it was not the dirt that beget the flies, rather, it was the secret buried beneath. 

"Why are you laughing, man?" Probst asked as they escorted me to the carriage where two uniformed policemen waited and treated me with the civility one might their own grandmother. They didn't seem fond of the inspectors, nor the inspectors of them. 

"You see!" I cried. "With your own eyes! The reason for my madness! You saw it! What disease it is that she bore!"

"Is your wife in that cellar, Herr Blume?" Heindrich followed sternly. 

"In the dirt. Where she belongs. Yes! A demon she bore from a loveless life and marriage. It turned her into that which she became. A whore of the flies." I couldn't help but to laugh. It was all so absurd. 

"You'll stand trial for murder and face execution, man. What humor is there in that?" Probst asked. 

"He's mad," Heinrich interrupted. "Isn't that evident?"

"Murder?" I laughed incredulously. "Trial and execution for the murder of a fly? Has the world gone mad, gentleman?! Oh, to this wretched world I do not belong! My death is long overdue. The hangman's noose or the firing squad will be of mercy to me."

True to their word I was tried and convicted and sentenced to hang for my crime. The judge didn't understand that I had merely murdered a fly. My defense was woefully inadequate, but I slept well in the jail and dreamt of Fleur. I traveled to her despite the bars and locks and the impenetrable block walls. I stared out at the white snow and in it I saw the swans Fleur and I often watched together. The gallows didn't frighten me. Death would reunite us, after all.

To-morrow.

I was hung and temporarily lost consciousness, or so I thought. Perhaps, though, this is what death is. Or I've been sentenced to purgatory. I was buried in a plot near my family at the behest of my brother, I was quite sure. A brother that kept fond memories of our youth and who believed in such things as family, loyalty, and dignity. But I awoke in that box unable to speak and in horrible pain. Rope burns about my neck. I lied there and waited for death to come, but it failed to arrive. It wasn't prompt, I ascertained. 

My hands were folded over my chest. I was shaved, my mustache was waxed, and I was in my finest tailored suit. It wasn't an eternal existence, I prayed, until I felt guilty for such a selfish supplication. I had no right for the mercy I begged for, though I had spent months importuned by flies — bedeviled to this obvious and justifiable outcome. God would understand, though, when I got there. Then I would ask him about the flies. Was is Satan who created the insects to plague man so terribly?

I closed my eyes, unable to move and I thought of Fleur so deeply that it was like she was there with me. In the coffin. I could smell her perfume and her sweet breath upon my face. But then a single noise broke my concentration and stole me yet again from her. It was the unmistakable droning of a fly from my accursed wife trapped inside the coffin with me. It landed on my lip but I couldn't move an arm to swat it. I shook my head and screamed for mercy that wouldn't come. I knew that I was doomed until death finally pardoned me — death that must be more merciful than life. But when? Oh, my God, when?!

To-morrow.