Stories from the Apocalypse - Fly

Oh my, I hear a crash and now the lights go dim .... so what am I going to do?

Guess the kid was just chewing on a sweet. A garishly-wrappered chocolate kiss-curl sweet and when I first saw his flaxen hair I thought, "I remember that face". I followed him down the road - he was skipping and singing a low song, some kind of nursery rhyme chant. I stopped in my tracks when he looked up at me. And there I was, frozen in time.

The kid smiles and holds up the wrapper. It bears a series of pan-toned images of a grinning child who consumes chocolate and blows bubbles into the air. One of them breaks free and drifts up, a hideous bubbled reflection that breaks open in the air, coating the candy-wrap in white stickiness.

The kid smiles a second time, drops the paper on the ground and walks away. As mysteriously as he comes, he fades from sight. So what's this candy-wrap stuck to the pavement? I go up to it and circle, endlessly round and round and round the white helix. Mesmerising. And time becomes a loop.

I guess the fly gets there first. I notice it just before the kid disappears from sight, circling around his head before it breaks off a loose buzz-bomb pattern to go investigate. The stickiness.

A fly crawling across the helix in search of sweetness, just look at those legs! I get down on my hands and knees to examine it. Eating the dust while my head cradles the cracked pavers, I see black crystalline rodding. Coxa, femur, tibia, tarsus ... all carrion-juiced and callaphora. The fly is there and sucking up the trail. Will it lay its eggs here, right here on the candy-wrap pitch?

It stops. For a second I think it's flaxen-haired and looking back at me, then the fly returns to its helix. Sucking up to the sweet spot at the centre of all things, oblivious to a world spinning around it. I watch it for hours as the sun begins to sink behind us, burning a deep cinammon glow to the summer air. Time for sleep as day one ends.

Early dawn and I'm out once more, pounding the beat. Sure enough it's there, the paper-wrap, stuck to the pavement and not even the morning breeze is going to free it up. It's there for the duration. But what's this? The fly's gone and in its place a creeping spider. It's stalking the helix. I can't believe this, it's stalking the helix! I watch it, hair on end and eyes aglint, the legs scurry in slow-motion as it traces out the stickiness.

And there's no sign of the fly, not a trace - just disappeared into the ether like the flaxen-haired kid. Now there's just a pregnant Buddha-bellied arachnid down there, crawling around and around and around. I get down on my hands and knees again. The early-morning sun has yet to warm the ground and the flags cold-kiss my cheek. I'm candy-wrapped now, staring at this waxy square of garish coloured paper and the streaks of stickiness radiating from the centre. Drawing me in.

The sun rises inexorably. I hear in the distance the first of the traffic as it begins to cut a bloodied swathe into the dawn bird-chorus. It gets louder and louder, swelling as the cars and trucks and cycles and buses and pick-ups and hot-rod day-time madness roar through thick, dark clouds of sulphur-scented vapour. It's rising up to form a low feral moan, punctuated by the dum-dum beats of passing pedestrians as they pound out the pavement towards the candy-wrap.

It's as if I'm invisible. They walk all over me as I lie flat to the ground staring at the spider.

Eventually the traffic begins to thin. I take the chance to grab a break, a short, sharp, shot of morning tannine, and then it's back to my station, this time armed with a deck-chair. I set it up to the right of the candy-wrap and get out my book. No-one's going to walk over me now! I turn the pages. One, two, three, four as words and pictures spring out and draw me in. They draw me to a pot-bellied dark star diamond of flailing legs that scurry endlessly around. Laying eggs in the dying dust of day two.

The bluebottles hatch first. They're there to greet me the next morning, feasting on the body of the fallen spider. Maggots tearing out the heart of some open system circulation in tissue sinuses. Special venous channels. Dead arachnid. This is the next chapter of my book as I sit and read in deck-chaired isolation, the thundering pedestrians breaking each side of me as I turn pages. Turning pages! The crawling maggot brains sucking out the sweetness absorbed by the spider, taken from the fly that crawled the helix. Round and round.

A third sun and it's back to the chair. A spider hatching and the arachnid rises - a myriad of scurrying legs sewing the soft white maggot wriggles against the garish-coloured wrap and where there was once stickiness is now the heaving mass of callophora cadaver. Oh my! I can't look away, nor can the passing stream of pedestrians. They look, too.

When we stop to observe, then time stands still and we're both frozen. Glance up for a second from these lines and see my tap, tap, tap ... ping. Let me offer you a candy-wrap and invite you deeper into the helix white stickiness blur. Do you really want to come this way? A flaxen-haired child stares out, a halo of flies around his head. Day four beckons.

They all saw it in front of them. The heaving mass of insect life and now the birds descend, shutting out the low feral-moaned traffic. Feasting on the spider that ate the fly that went round and round a white spiral, candy-kiss curl. The birds are here! Winged and graceful they descend in slow-motion patterns, cutting through the air to pluck off the arachnids one by one. A silhouetted eagle circles, high - overhead. It counts off the day and now.

Where did that fox come from? This morning, this fifth morning when I come to plant out the deck-chair it's looking up at me. A rictus-grin corpse beside the still sticky wrap. Perhaps it's come hunting for an angel-flight - the birds have long since gone, but I can see between the white-teeth grimace a solitary bloodied feather. How I wish the eyes would close; when I sleep they come to me, eyes open and staring. I need some tea real bad and I unwind the stopper of the vaccum-flask. I need to read my book too, so I uncork the pages. But still I feel the cold lupine stare from somewhere deep within. I can't shake it off, even when the waiting sun comes.

And then the first crash. Day six and it wakes me from bright midnight dreams. Crashing metal and screams and then ... just silence. It's that half-way place between night and day, the time where we dance briefly before the clock begins to tick once more. The time of possibility. And now I awake, bleary-eyed, to fetch out the deck-chair.

The wheels still spin as I take up post. The windscreen lies cracked before me, a head rising up stiff and bloodied through it to salute the new day. Was it the stickiness that brought the fly to feast on spider, that took the birds that caught the fox, that brought this .... That brought this driver to stare at the candy-wrap spinning and take his eyes from the road, to crash.

I set out the deck-chair once more, as blue lights descend, spiralling out into the warming Summer air. A flaxen-haired child accompanies the procession, around his head a buzzing halo of flies.

I hear the mounting as day seven arrives. Sucked into the sweetness, one driver after another, just molten metal and ramming up against a blue-lighted wall as fly becomes spider and is eaten by the bird plucked out by the fox and metal hits metal taking out the power-lines and now.

The lights grow dim ... so what am I going to do?