How Few the Threads

I.

Sucking the last pre-ash from a tar-yellowed butt, I squint into the guttering sun.

My course has deviated from its plotted path to an accelerating downward slope. Death will come spontaneously, recklessly, and will be the final daydreamed device to rescue me from my problems.

On my ankle, there is a piece of missing skin the size and shape of a swan's egg. The expanding edges of the wound are a rare red; dirty violets and browns ring the laceration itself, within which I can see the raw ends of capillaries. Miraculously, some hairs remain inside the pulsing subdermal layers, which are spotted with brilliant blood. Over all this, there is a shiny film of green. Every time I try to stand, a locus of pain forms inside the wound, spiraling up my leg until I want to throw up.

So, without doctors, without antibiotics, I smoke, drink gin, and wait to die.

Under this ominous sky, under these mocking trees with their chattering leaves, I am doomed,

says the Fly.

Yesterday, the Fly landed on my fingertip, which bore a bit of grape pulp under the nail. The old shoo-fly-don't-bother-me didn't kick in, although it's as instinctual as a horse-tail flick. I morosely watched his gorgeous, bottle-green shell glint in harsh yellow against the light. His many-jointed mouthpiece worked and probed for every bit of juice; his slender, hair-like legs feather-brushed around my fingertip.

He was a maggot for a week, a soft, translucent infant with moist skin and an undulating body. He shrank and grew and hardened into a tight little drum, a tiny bullet as red as a gourd, shining and taut. He emerged days later, nosediving and walking on ceilings, an insectile Jesus, infinitely capable but mortal beyond contemplation.

The orchard tree is low,

he says,

and still. It hulks over the water, leaning warily in to stare into the last reflected rays of the sunset.

Over the gray garden wall, the flattened desert extends into impure sand and pimento brush. On the paseo, people jog, stroll, bike, make their ways in strangely uniform procession, as if their velocities were dictated by the Big Brother suburban conveyor belt beneath their mildly athletic feet and echoed by the pace on the freeway and railroad tracks behind them. These are the menacing, monotonous conveyor belts that twine around the country, binding us to mediocrity.

I squint, smoke, feel myself bound to it as my wound grows ever the more green; soybean green, absinthe green.

The power lines rip and crease the sordid sky, that trite whore in cloudless blue. The Fly lands and feeds on the fresh green oozing from my wound. The gaudy horizon grows thicker and deeper. Even here, in the desert, there is dew coming in the ether.

There is a black ribbon winding out of his mouth, thick and furling, lurid, vampy. It will curl and twist into knots.

And I will die alone,

he says,

without knowing another, without knowing a life beyond flylife: eating, shitting, eating shit, mating on shit, laying eggs in shit, which will hatch and live in shit.

Excremental are my origins, but, god willing, not my ends.

II.
"if we candied violets
i think i might
have one
more in
ME
even if
when we
are done i am
nothing left at all
but this splinter of you"

I smell you before I see you. I can almost hear you: harmonic, bells of air, a music box.

My eyes close; my mouth opens. I can barely breathe, so weighted is your scent. Your fragrance is dark and lovely and heavy with moisture.

I cannot but buckle on top of you; my joints run with water.

Bury me like this, lay my body down, shed
my wings.

I want nothing.

Your taste is new. You taste so rich and
so familiar.

You fill all my insides to the top of my throat.

My eyes are filmed with what you've left there. Mud-caked feathers pull down on my numbed legs. I feel crystals of you drying in every crack in my skull.

You cling in my mouth; can you not let me

be clean?

My shining is dull; my quickness is slow. Where is the hour I had an hour ago?

"it is a spoiled sweet
it is a dulled edge
don't you
baby
ME
you
call me
that but you don't
call me don't you"

III.

The eye of the morning is stabbed, is pried open, and bleeds its pierced light onto rocks and empty beds,

says the Fly.

The Lizard died scrambling for a foothold amid the deep and rapid waves.

The Spider has been still for a long time, a tumbleweed of hollow exoskeleton in a raveled cocoon.

The Ant is gone.

The Fly huddles and clings to the corner between the ceiling and the wall. Soon, he will fall like a shell, smoking and used up. He will bounce on the aseptic white tile. His eulogy will be written in the dust on houseplant leaves, and a maid will bury him in the stale embrace of a wet Cello sponge.

I am sick of his blood-eyed talk, his wing-shiver wisdom. His words have wound around inside this rattle, and I listen impatiently, waiting for his death prattle as my wound seethes and my teeth grind.

My footprints have not displaced one mote,

he says.

So I will leave no gap in space-time-matter-energy.

How few the threads that bound me into our universal tapestry! How loosely they coiled, how easily snapped, how quickly raveled, how silently fell away, and I now drift into the vacuum of unknowing, unknowable infinity.

A pinprick of emptiness grows in the pit of my trembling thorax. The oozy vines around me twist, the eely tentacles of silence, the seas of unconsciousness and solitude, of separation from sensation.

Fear is the final dive.

IV.

There is a light metallic twitch, a paper flick, the sound of barely moving air,

the Fly has fallen.