I have not talked yet about the flies. But they are so much part of what has happened, is happening, that any portrait of our collective misery is incomplete without them. They are the buzzing, maddening accompaniment to all our fears, all our sorrows. In the beginning, they invaded our city singly— that is, a few barely noticed droning little aerial grotesqueries, one alighting its bristled limbs on a streetlamp, another on the underside of the bookshelf, still another on someone’s bare arm— then in great black droves, altering the color and tone of the air.

At first, no one commented on them much because, in addition to having other matters to contend with, warmer weather always brought them in fairly considerable numbers into our city, even during ordinary years, and so they were nuisances that we all knew well. But once their numbers swelled into an unignorable mass, with no place a refuge, even the most sacred, their presence came to be generally felt as ominous, menacing, as well as an insult to all our suffering, disrupting what should be the quietude of our private fears and sorrows. Worst of all, you heard as much as saw them and when one flew near your ear, as they inevitably did, the high-pitch whine seemed to hit directly upon our rawest innermost nerves of dread and agitation.

Nor did the usual domestic measures (ex. bowls of orange peels and mint leaves mixed in vinegar and soap) make any difference; if anything, the flies mocked these efforts, seeming to double if not triple in number afterward, until a superstition formed that with these unnatural pests all the old remedies were in fact a provocation, and so all we were left with were the most simple and futile defenses: slapping hands, waving fans, closing windows, cursing. Indeed, throughout all quarters of our city, during any hour of the day, you could hear “damn flies” spit with venom, a sentiment that united us perhaps more than any other. Some recommended visits to a rumored witches’ haunt deep within the fern-lush swampland of the forest, where a remedy could be procured for a price; others claimed these very same wild women had sent the flies to us, punishing us for the violent deeds of our forebearers; still more denied witches exist at all.

The scientific explanation is perhaps all that is needed, anyway: where there is death, there are flies, and this was the worst season of death our city had known in two generations. So they stick their hairy legs and vile mouths into the fetid garbage and filth that has always pooled in our neglected alleyways and into which now also runs blood, fresh and despaired, and they grow fatter and lustier than ever. I have seen them locked into obscene pairs in midair— moving upflight, downflight, and sideflight as one— high above some putrid trickle of stolen vitality. Then too they lay their sordid eggs in poor unprotected flesh, at the barest onset of decay, to then bring forth writhing maggots to condemn us still further. I imagine sometimes that the end of the plague of wolves must sound like nothing so much as the absence of their evil, exasperating drone; yes, the end of all this must be silence, or better yet, the distant crash of waves.

Three days ago, I lounged on the divan in my friend’s sunset-drenched living room, a bit drunk, happy, and suddenly sat up, remarking, “your windowsill is filthy,” and he replied, “it’s these fucking flies; they leave their shit everywhere.” I dutifully grabbed a rag from the countertop and wiped clean the white-painted wood; then felt dizzy, sick. In my hands was the rust-colored wipe that was all that remained of our lost brethren in the excrement of an insect.

– Elizabeth Quirk

Author’s Note: “Downflight” is an excerpt from a longer work-in-progress.