One of us must have killed the fly.
But it’s been too long to remember whom.
I am standing in-front of the full length window in the kitchen, sponge in hand, ready to clean the dead fly stuck to the windowpane.
It has been there for two weeks. Crystallised in its last moments.
I bend down to my knees to get a better look. It is beautifully gruesome. The archetype image that comes into mind when you think ‘swatted fly’.
It is almost perfectly preserved.
The once 3D body flattened to 2D, as if someone simply let out the air. The wings are apart, the body still composed and the legs sticking out at odd angles. The splashes of colour around it, are what really give it away. A mixture of green and red. I wonder why red. I didn’t know flies had blood in them or do they suck the blood out of something else? Or is it the green that I should be worried about?
I am not a violent person, but there is something about a buzzing fly in a closed space that drives me to my brink. My animal instinct tells me to go in for the kill. Fly swatter in hand, I direct powerful blows through the air. Finding solace in the ‘swish, swish’. Real satisfaction however, is bestowed only upon impact. I have through the years evolved and now open the window before going on my frenzy, so that it may have a chance to fly out of its own volition.
I am still on the kitchen floor observing the dead fly, when another thought crosses my mind.
It’s been two weeks since the flies corpse has been triumphantly exposed on the windowpane and none of the three people living here bothered to clean it.
Fifteen days of walking past it and we collectively did nothing.
Cleaning it would have been an admission of guilt.
In our silence we have agreed to become accessories to murder.
Let the sentence be handed down, let our humanity be judged.