The Fly and I

There’s a fly in this room, and it and I seem to share the same cup-a-soup addiction (although he, I’ll call it he, doesn’t seem too keen on the dregs of this Beef and Tomato I’ve left for him. Obviously a choosy wee fly, though he gets all restless when I’m slow with my Minestrone).

I’ve opened the window open wide for him several times but he seems reluctant to leave and, with it being late autumn now I can’t afford to be letting the precious heat from my wee fan-heater belch out of an open window too often.

There’s a hoar frost on the ground and my little seaside town has gone into its yearly hibernation. Ice-cream parlours do meagre business and the steam from the chip shops rises to meet the cold air. Street lamps barely create enough light for drunks to navigate their way homeward and the smoker’s outside the boozers shiver and hunch and stamp their feet to encourage blood circulation. Just shows the tenacity of that addiction that folk will resolutely stand on the streets in blizzard conditions to cop a lungful of nicotine. Not only are they risking all sorts of cancers and heart disease but they’ll maybe have double-pneumonia as well, just to complicate things.

I stand with my latest cup-a-soup (Chicken, my fifth of the day, although the third of those was Golden Vegetable) and look out of my window onto the back of the tenements opposite. Lots of lives being lived over there is what I think. I see a middle-aged woman standing at her sink. Maybe she was once a prostitute, for all I know. Or perhaps she’d once considered becoming a nun. Was there a man sitting watching TV in the front room after she’d made him his tea?

The curtains are drawn in the flat next door. Maybe a death? Or just on holiday

The fly was buzzing at the window. It was scaling the face of it. I wasn’t fooled, though. Before, I’d have taken this as a sign that it wanted out and away, but experience had disavowed this notion, so I won’t be opening the window to encourage escape because this helpfulness will be ignored by the fly.

He wants to stay here where the cup-a-soup dregs are easy pickings.