The Flies

As she kills the flies, Gloria asks for mercy, then sprays an insecticide that sticks to the walls for weeks.

Since her roommate is gone, her apartment is filthy, and the flies seem to regenerate in every corner of the ceiling and fly out of every pipe. Sometimes, they come in through the door when Gloria takes out the trash — the only reason why she leaves the apartment these days, because going out means seeing cars, pick-up trucks, trailers, and Gloria imagines a shred of her roommate on every seat: a small bundle of torn hair, a piece of a severed fingertip. So Gloria stays home and focuses on the flies; she tries not to blink until the muscles around her eyes hurt, and she starts torturing that bald spot behind her head, now deprived of hair, of life.

Meanwhile, the flies hit the glass of the window, stupid, confident in their way out until the insecticide starts kicking in. They don’t die immediately. On the contrary, they start buzzing louder, try to fly faster. Upwards.

The buzz gives Gloria a headache, and she scratches the bald spot between the hairs on the nape of her neck. She’s been locking everything for days, barring the windows and watching the flies. Sometimes, they collapse on the floor, exhausted. More often, they fly in circles for hours and keep hitting the windowpane. Gloria imagines the insecticide strangling them like a hand around a neck and melting their insides. The buzz sounds like a scream. She gets up and crushes them with one of her flip-flops to give them mercy, but also to stop the incessant buzz that gives her a headache. She often leaves them there, but when she can’t stand the sight of the crushed limbs anymore, she picks them up, wiping them away with a napkin. At first, she throws them in the trash, but then the idea of all those tiny corpses piling up starts bothering her, so she decides to toss them in the toilet. She looks at the little black bodies spinning in the water until they are out of sight. That’s when she usually starts scratching the bald spot on her head. She smells something rotten, feels the raw skin under her fingers, the blood clotting under her nails. Hair will never grow there again. If she ever goes out with a man after what happened to the roommate, she’ll cover it with another strand. But it’s been days now, and the ache always starts right there, behind her head, a discomfort, as if someone behind her is watching her, waiting for something.

The doctor tells her, it’s just stress. Did you experience any trauma, a sudden loss?

Gloria thinks about her roommate, who got all dolled up like any other night and never came back. She thinks of the detached nails that were found on the backseat of that ordinary dude’s car, the scratches on the window, and the fake eyelash stuck to the glass like a splattered bug. She thinks about the guy who drove to the river to dump her, the corpse falling, shrinking until it disappeared in the water. She thinks about God, who must have watched the roommate getting into the man’s car like Gloria watches the flies now as they come in and hit the windowpane, their false hope of a way out. She thinks of her roommate’s words as she had applied makeup before leaving their apartment: this guy is the one.

The flies pile up underneath the windowsill. Gloria scratches her bald spot and feels the blood under her nails.

She keeps watching them. She hears their buzz even after they’re dead.