Connection established.

My left arm hurts. I go to pet it with my right hand, but I grab onto metal. I open my eyes and see it missing, replaced by a mechanical prosthesis. When I move my arm, the metal one is the one that moves, but when my arm hurts, it’s not the metal one that hurts.

I pull up the inside of the wrist to my face; there’s a tiny digital clock in there. It’s ten to seven. I sigh, and pull myself up to sit. My bed is shocking pink and chartreuse yellow. I look around myself to see if any of the others are up already. This faint dawn light falls through a window and allows me to distinguish many figures around me. There are blouses, shirts, mini skirts, jackets, scarfs and sweaters, on a ring of clothes racks all around us. We are all lying together in a huge pile of sports bras. From the looks of it, also a spent fire on the floor at safe distance from the undergarments.

Another person is indeed awake, a chubby guy with a pair of round glasses and his feet wrapped in foulards, old lady foulards. He’s propped up sitting with his back to a mirrored column, and scribbles in ball pen in a notebook in the light of a headlamp.

“Morning” I say.

“Morning G” he answers, not getting distracted from writing.

“Breakfast?” What I great idea, the one I just proposed. I’m very hungry.

“Yes, but quickly. You know I don’t like it here.”

“We do have essentially unlimited supplies here.”

“Not wrong, but we also can’t stay in a place like this for too long. This is the first kind of place the flies go to.”

I pull myself up. A young woman is still sleeping to my right, buried in brightly coloured synthetic fabric, and a young man to my left, his arm extending out towards the fireplace. “Flies are not that smart.”

“You know perfectly well that the only experiment you can perform to test that assumption” he remarked, slamming the book shut “can only be performed once.”

I smirk. “Christ, that’s dramatic. Is that going into your memoir?”

“At least I’m doing something with my life not directly concerning my primary needs. Also, tell me I’m wrong.”

“I like tending to my primary needs very much, thank you for your interest.” I stretch, then kick the side of the girl to my right. “But you’re not wrong, R. Perhaps we can get some food to go and get going.”

Girl groans. She wears a very elegant burgundy paisley neck tie as a head band. “Fuck you want.”

“Get up, Z. And do your magic and wake up T because the guy could sleep through a mushroom.” Okay, so, is the entire English alphabet here?

“Why the hurry?” she says dragging her fingers across her eye bags. “Fuck’s going on.”

“What a gentlewoman” notes chubby guy. Which was called R, I reckon.

I step in. “R has got the creeps, and I don’t think I have the confidence to contradict him. We’re escaping flies and this place is a big fat rotting steak. We get our shit and move out.”

“Oh so you’re like, the captain, now.” she counters. “Not even going through the trouble of phrasing your orders as proposals.” She squats in front of T and strokes his hair. And now that I’ve seen her face, she’s definitely not mom. I mean, Mary. This is confusing.

“I’m just someone who doesn’t want to be filled with lead for a visit to a fucking H&M. But please, let’s have a nice debate over tea.”

“Man I’d kill for some tea.” mumbles T as he wakes up from A’s caresses. “Can we get some tea first?” A turns to me: “you’re already like, twenty percent lead or something.” I guess she refers to the arm.

“That’s stainless steel,” growls R as he struggles to put on a loaded backpack, “you mongoloid.”

I laugh, really hard. Why do I laugh so hard? Perhaps I need this very much. A walks up to R to (only partially playfully) slap him on the head. On my other side T, revealing himself a lanky, short haired guy, stands up. “What if they started putting, I don’t know,” he asks, “steel bullets in the flies. Like we’re vampires.”

I giggle again. “I believe that was silver, T.”

“Oh merde, I’m too tired.” He slaps both cheeks. “They wouldn’t get silver bullets, wouldn’t they?”

“I mean, a silver bullet would cost like ten flies as an order of magnitude.” says R.

“And… like a million of us.” adds Z.

“A million of us.” I repeat, partly to myself.

click

We are walking silently in the cold morni

Connection severed.

“What are flies?” asked Sophie immediately. “Because… I guess ‘mushroom’ means a bomb.”

“Yeah, of course.”

“But what are the flies? Soldiers?”

Wallace smiled. “You have never heard of the flies?”

The niece shook her head.

“Well… show, don’t tell, right?”

“…guess so?”

“Don’t worry about it for now.”

Connection established.

We are walking silently in the cold morning in a field beside an empty parking lot. I’m not hungry anymore, but perhaps a bit thirsty.

The road is blocked by abandoned cars, so we prefer to travel parallel to it in the dewy grass. Everyone is carrying big, heavy backpacks but me. I have this single leather strap across my chest and I am heaving something huge and elongated on my back, but I can’t tell what it is. Feels like some sort of tube or pipe, and it’s really, really heavy. I turn back for a moment to look at the abandoned shopping mall, already smaller in the distance. We’ve just walked past a billboard with directions for the underground parking lot in yellow and blue, and we’re passing another one with a slender model laying down in black lingerie. Big photoshopped tits and rubbery skin and all. The writing is unreadable to me. The letters do not make sense in this order. It feels weird to think about it, so I stop trying.

“Man” shouts R from the top of the file. “We can’t carry a billboard with us, can we?”

I laugh. “Afraid not, love.”

Z walks third, before me. “All you can think of, huh? Setting aside this is like the millionth one of her we’ve seen.”

“You can’t understand” R replies, offended, “what it means to be a man. To be a man, and live without the internet for, what is it been now, a year, no girlfriend… you start to go fishing.”

“Oh yeah, sure” shouts her. “Me, being a filthy female, cannot understand what it means to like sex. In fact, I am only affected by current circumstances in that I cannot go onto tampons dot com and read all about the latest news in makeup, cooking and découpage. Thank you, thank you R…”

“Oh sod off you fucking bitch!”

I am giggling hysterically. I can’t see his face but I can certainly picture it.

“…thank you so much for showing me the error of my ways. I shall now grow a micropenis and a neck beard and write a journal and…”

“it’s a memoir.”

I get moderately close to choking laughing. Two notes to self (which self?). One: R does not enjoy being made fun of. Two: it’s hilarious. The well-endowed madam is now tiny behind us. We brush past vines slowly digesting an old fridge. “Though,” I add to the conversation, “I do believe we can carry a small catalogue. On that note, there is a slight chance…”

“You did not.” whines Z, but kind of loses it for a moment and laughs just a tiny bit.

“…there is a tiny, almost negligible probability that I may have packed a certain booklet into backpack number two.” I continue.

“You got a fucking lingerie catalogue. That’s supplies to you. Jerk-off material is supplies now, gentlemen.”

“Eh, it’s not my genre, to be honest.” I specify. The sun has risen, slowly, just left of our travel direction. Stripes of pink and crimson lazily entangle and this electric, humid hair slogs through my nose and into my lungs. “I took it for my dear friends so that they don’t miss their girlfriends too much.”

“Amen to that and thank you, G” shouts R. “That there’s real friendship. I will treasure this gift always.”

“Let this be” I shout harder, “let this be a good omen. That we may never go fishing.”

Z concedes armistice. “I can definitely amen to that.”

“I would kill for fish.” T mumbles all of a sudden. “You take your salmon fillet.”

We all go completely silent. I can hear my arm whirring above all, and then our footsteps.

T continues: “it’s juicy and fresh. Orange and white, strong but good smell. You keep the skin for now. On a plate you mix breadcrumbs, salt and pepper. You take some pistachios, the unsalted ones, not the salted ones. You take them out of the shell and you grind them down, and you add it to the bread. Then you cut half a clove of garlic, and quite a bit of parsley of course, because this is fish. All together to make this pistachio powder.”

T slows down and makes a bit of a pause.

“You now take your fillet. Skin up, meat down, you press it onto the powder. It’s orange on green, soft and squishy on hard and crumbly. Sea on earth. And if it wasn’t for the broad fish tapeworm, you could eat it right here and then. But you resist. You dress a container in baking paper, drizzle oil, move fillets tempested in nutty diamonds in there. They are your beautiful babies and you don’t want to part with them.”

“Heh” smirks Z.

I hear a faint unfamiliar sound.

“In the oven they go. 180 Celsius, twenty-five minutes. But you don’t need to count the time, you can just watch them as they fizzle and toughen, and droop all of the grease. The salmon is by all means the pork of the sea.”

“Man” says R. “Tell us what it tastes like.”

There’s some kind of weird sound here, far away, or not far but just weak, like a high-pitch buzzing… “Oh fuck!” My heart thumps like a sledgehammer. “I think I hear a fly.”

Suddenly, it’s panic. We all exchange imprecations through clenched teeth, fumble, stop, clumsily jump towards pathetically small bushes to try and hide. We search the sky trying to locate it, but we don’t see it, and it’s a clear morning in absolutely flat terrain. What am I looking for? “Help me set up.” I ask almost crying. Frenetically I unburden my back of the large object I’m carrying, and R helps me set it upright on the meadow. It is indeed a large, tube like object of metal, kind of like a cannon, or a bazooka, but somewhat simpler in design.

“Fuck, I heard it.” says T as me and R fumble with the minimalistic controls, a potentiometer and a couple of coloured LEDs, haphazardly hand-soldered. Do I hear it again? Louder, perhaps. Bzzz. We open the tiniest, cutest legs on this weird cylinder and set it up angled very much like a cannon. The mouth however is not really a mouth, it has a spherical grid not dissimilar to that on a microphone, so I don’t know if we intend to shoot with it or what. Apparently we kind of do, because I jump behind the thing and pull it up with all my strength; the legs are apparently only necessary if I have already determined the orientation I need. It’s fairly heavy, certainly more on my right than on my left side for some reason, but my mind is somewhere else, right there in the spectacular dawn searching for a buzzing bastard. “Everybody, shut up, now.”

Only the heavy breathing of four, the lightest breeze through the bushes, and a bird chirping in the distance. Then, I hear it again. Bzzz. Is it louder or softer? Seems softer, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up. The others scan the sky for me, since I cannot possibly turn while caber tossing – and trying to hold my breath at the same time.

This goes on for minutes, and they are painfully slow, uncertain minutes drenched in anguish.

I drop the fat fucker down in the grass, the ridiculous front legs squeaking. Stand up, hands on my sides. Long breath, slow down.

“It’s gone.” I announce.

I think we all kind of believe this, but still wait a good thirty seconds before saying anything or moving at all. Then, we grab our things. R holds the cylinder up while I close the legs, turn off the switch and ensure the green LED stops dancing and the red one stops staring. I load it on my back once again.

We resume walking, in silence.