Mutant winter flies
by Carol Dunn
HUERFANO- You’re falling asleep, and through the fog you hear a buzzing noise. It’s slow and deep, lumbering and ponderous, like a B-52 bomber that is having trouble staying in the air. It flies around your bedroom a couple times, then *WHAP* it runs into a wall. *WHAP*WHAP* Yes, it’s one of those mutant winter flies. The chunky, hairy ones with big eyes, and fangs, and claws on its legs. Truth is, you’d rather hear it flying than not flying. Because if it’s not flying, where is it? Is it crawling its big hairy legs through your hair? Is it sniffing the inside of your ear? As soon as you fall asleep, will it crawl inside your nose?
Huerfano weather is confusing to bugs. It’s cold. It’s warm. Cold. Warm. Cold. They don’t know whether to hibernate or call a cab. They wake up in the middle of January, and they’re looking around for all their buddies to go have a sour milk latte. They’re kind of sleepy and discombobulated. Obviously that end of summer bash is long past, and here they are waking up behind a door after getting drunk on fresh cow manure and staggering into your house. After some recon, they can see outside through a window. But they don’t know it’s a window. It looks like outside to them. So they will get up a good head of steam and *WHAP* right into the window. A mutant fly will do this 129 times IN A ROW, just in the off chance that it will suddenly blast right through. After crashing to the floor head first innumerable times, and lucky for them that is not where their brain is located, finally they realize it’s no use. All the good dung piles are frozen hard. Depression sets in, and they take to walking everywhere. They sing, “The party’s over.”
When flies have friends to hang with, they are in good spirits. It may only take five of them to drive a human being barking mad. They find this immensely amusing. It’s the mob mentality. However, a solitary fly is a sad fly.
You’ll see one of these loners trudging along the floor, hoping to encounter a piece of birthday cake or a toilet – anything to remind them of the good old days. A compassionate person may scoop up the poor fellow and toss him outside, so they don’t have to kill him. Think about that for just a minute. On the cold, frozen ground or in a snow bank? Well, never mind.
Mutant winter flies are still flies, and they are stealthy. If you don’t vacuum them up right away – which come to think of it isn’t much better than getting tossed on a snow bank – they will go into hiding, maybe under a couch, maybe in a tennis shoe. Eventually they go back to sleep. It was all a bad dream. All a bad dream.
