Flyguy Pt 3

With that, the fly buzzes out the open door and is gone. It’s either now or never, I push the door further open, peer out, see that no one is in the hallway and walk out. My room is the last one at the end of a long hall. On the right, a large window looks out onto an overgrown garden filled with dark green bushes, giant flowers that seem from here to be at least several feet across and bending under their own weight and moss-covered statues peering through the dense foliage. The sun shines down on an algae-covered pond in the center. Beyond is a forest, whose trees are all green. Even the bark. I’ve never seen anything like it before.

I turn around and look down the hallway, lined with doors, each with a little window and a food tray slot on the bottom just like mine. As I start to walk down, toward the other end of the hall, I look into the little windows to see if there are other patients, but they’re all empty. At the far end of the hall, there’s a heavy looking door that seems to seal the ward and I’m hoping to make my way to it quickly before someone comes. That’s when I hear a key in the lock of the door and it starts to open. I quickly try the lock on the door nearest to me, it gives and I jump inside to avoid being seen.

I peer out the window of the room just as two lizards walk by, and they make their way down the hallway, see my open door, and start hissing. They run back out of the hall, their long reptilian tongues wagging behind them as they move. It’s not every day you see a lizard running, they’re cold blooded and don’t have a lot of energy. So, I guess I must be a hot commodity. In their haste, they forget to close the hallway door, allowing me to run out of the room and stick my head outside of the ward. These lizards are pretty forgetful, I think. I can’t believe that fly has so much trouble, but maybe he’s just crazy.

When I look out, they’re already gone and a desk to my right that I’m imagining must normally be staffed by a lizard nurse or guard is also empty. I see another heavy door facing me, probably another ward, a window to my left out of which I get a glimpse of more oddly green trees and overgrown gardens and to my right the desk and a short hall that ends with a set of double doors. It looks like everyone ran off when they saw that I wasn’t in my room. I run past the desk and prop open the doors, which are also unlocked. Perhaps they’re letting me go? I smell fresh air and see the gardens that surround the hospital. It would be relaxing, save for the giant reptiles.

The lush landscape outdoors opens before me, there’s a path made of half-broken flagstones with weeds sprouting through the cracks. The path curves around a large overgrown hedge which looks shaggy, like an unkempt horse’s mane. Ahead, there’s a cracked and stained stone bench. The crack goes all the way through, but it hasn’t fallen apart yet. It seems like no one has been maintaining this place for years.

I know I need to get out of sight as quickly as possible before they come back, and as I walk around the path and get halfway, I see a worn dirt trail leading off to the left away from the hospital and into an even wilder part of the grounds. I can see weeds and grasses growing at least 10 feet tall and a few equally giant flowers. I look ahead and in back along the path and see no one and duck into the tall weeds.

The grasses quickly surround me and although there’s a path I can’t see where I’ve come from when I look back. The tall thin stalks have covered the trail. In front, a narrow path continues to wind and I follow it. I stop as I approach one of the giant flowers. It’s even more enormous when I’m right up next to it. Each petal is as large as my head and it waves in the breeze along with all the grasses around me, making a swooshing sound like ocean surf. There are more of these large flowers all around me, higher than my head and what I thought were trees from the hospital are in fact giant flowers themselves. When I look up I see petals blocking out the sun, like leaves creating a canopy high overhead.

I finger the petals in front of me in amazement. The flower looks like a giant African violet. Each petal is at least a foot wide. I had trouble accepting the lizards, Dr. Komodo or me being a fly, but at least the rest of the world had remained the same. Now, I’m human again but the entire world has changed. Or is it that I’ve gotten smaller. I don’t know, it’s all relative. Either way, I’m afraid to meet whomever might be here. If the hospital had giant lizards, what’s in the giant garden? But until I find out, I might as well smell the roses, as they say. And what a smell, the giant flowers are emitting a scent like a hundred flower stores, a rich and earthy perfume. It’s intoxicating and my vision starts to blur a little. When I touch the petals of the African violet, it’s not soft like I’m expecting, but spongy and thick like a pool toy. Otherwise, I guess the petals would just flop from under their own weight.

I look beyond the petals in front of me and see bigger than life dandelions, daisies and other wild flowers all around, I feel my eyes enlarge just trying to take it all in and realize this is when it would be good to have fly vision. Lost in this reverie, I at first don’t notice the clicking sound coming from somewhere dark between the flowers or the shiny bright green compound eyes attached to a long green stalk that looks like a living piece of celery. The eyes stare at me, hardly a blemish in their unblinking alien green. The stalk moves forward through the stems, its long antennae leading the way. The clicking I realize comes from the sharp side jaws that are moving rhythmically. The clicking is joined by a snapping sound when it moves its front legs, which end with what I can only describe as serrated scissors, lined with black spikes. The monstrous insect snaps at me menacingly.

“L-lost little f-f-fly?” says what I realize is a towering praying mantis, whose voice sounds like a heavy breathing prank caller, clicking after every word. The mantis stands up on its four rear hind legs, rising from its hiding place amid the thick underbrush and large flowers. One of its serrated pincers snaps the purple flower in front of me in half. “Y-y-you’ve d-disturbed our m-m-meditations.”

The clicking when he talks is hard to understand and I think he might even be stuttering. While he eyes me, his body pushes even higher, towering above me and his eyes mounted on the long stalk come down disturbingly close to my face, as do his terrible snapping arms.

I try to speak, to make the mantis see that I’m not going to be intimidated, large green scissors or not. But instead of a voice, I barely get out a croak. Every time I open my mouth I let out just a gasp, which becomes more and more of a buzz. Oh no, this is definitely the wrong time. I look down and my body is transforming into fly form. I look down at my arms, and they’re covered with a black exo-skeleton again and my hands are back to suction cups. How embarrassing. I pivot my head a few times nervously.

“H-h-have you ever tried… m-m-meditation,” says the stuttering mantis, slowly lowering his long, celery-stick like body back down to the ground and propping his head on his prayerful yet deadly arms. “Y-y-you seem a-a-anxious. We r-r-recommend meditation. Some of us p-p-pray, but we meditate. It helps u-u-us stay … c-c-calm. In such a vast universe we can easily g-get o-o-o-overwhelmed with questions, Why are we here? What’s o-o-our p-p-purpose. These are h-h-hard questions with few answers.”

The most unnerving thing about the mantis, besides his razor sharp forearms or his existential yearnings are those enormous, unblinking green eyes. There’s no escaping them, jutting out on that stalk-head with his all-seeing stare.

“Well, I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” I say with a nervous buzz as I start backing away. “I’ll be on my way. I really didn’t mean to disturb your meditation, I realize how difficult it is to keep your concentration and I couldn’t agree more on those questions you’ve got there, they’re the universals, no doubt about it.”

“O-o-oh,” clicks the mantis. “It’s n-n-o bother, w-w-we often spend our time th-th-thinking deeply. Anyway, m-m-m-meditation generates such an ap-ap-appetite, don’t you agree? And it looks like we’ve found something quite tasty to n-n-n-nibble.”

And with that, he picks up the snapped flower and brings it up to his hideous mouth, and pops it in, it goes down his gullet like a branch through a wood-chipper.

“Y-y-you still look so nervous,” clicks the mantis, his mouth filled with plant and spittle. “Did y-you think we were going to eat y-y-you? W-w-we’re a Buddhist, veg-vegetarian, m-m-mantis. No more flies for u-ssss, although y-y-you were ever so… t-t-tasty.”

I breathe a sigh of relief. But I’ve never heard of a vegetarian mantis and I’m ready to flick off at a moment’s notice, I am a fly after all.

“So…” says the mantis. “What is y-y-your religious persuasion, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Well you know, I didn’t really think about it before,” I say, not sure where this is going. “It’s pretty funny, but just a few minutes ago, I was a human being who thought he was hallucinating that he was a fly, being kept in a mental hospital by giant lizards.”

This would sound totally ridiculous if I weren’t telling my story to an oversized praying mantis. I cover the whole thing, waking up in the mental hospital, talking to Dr. Komodo, turning into a giant compound eyed fly, then waking up and talking to the small fly who wanted some of my lunch and then getting out when they forgot to lock the door. “I realize it’s kind of far out, you know?” I say. “It made me think I was really losing it. But then, here I am and if I’m not losing it, and this is real, well then I don’t know what to believe.”

“S-s-s-sounds bizarre,” the mantis says. “But y-y-you can’t question the spiritual with the rational. W-w-we’re all just flies in God’s spider web and when you get caught and he ties you up and sucks your blood, there’s not much you can do about it.”

Mmm, I don’t really like his example.

“Well, that’s just it. I don’t or at least didn’t believe in God,” I say. “It all just seemed such an obvious wish-fulfillment thing, everyone just dreaming of some kind of cosmic sugar daddy to take away the pain of being alive. I thought I was too smart for that. That was until I turned into a fly, I really didn’t see that one coming, it was sort of out of left field, you know? Now I’m clueless.”

I wave my front leg in front of me. It’s thin and covered in minute prickly hairs. I can see the mantis multiple times and notice that my field of vision has enlarged too. I can see all around me, even behind my head. The flowers are amazingly patterned, in ways that I never noticed before. It must be the UV light that I can now see as an insect. I guess there are some positives to this whole transformation.

The mantis looks deep in thought, even though it’s hard to tell with his unblinking green eyes staring at me and his jaws still working over the last bits of purple petal. “But what w-w-w-would the point of existence be without belief?” he asks, clicking disapprovingly.

“I don’t have an answer for you, but maybe that’s why I was sent to that hospital, maybe such a world was just too much for me to take and I lost it. Maybe there are no answers out there or maybe there are. I think I need to follow this fly thing I have going, see where it takes me,” I say, motioning with a leg towards the forest of flowers. “If I find anything out, I’ll come back and let you know.”

“S-s-s-sounds good fly,” clicks the mantis as it pulls back into the undergrowth so that within seconds I lose sight of him in the tall grasses and flowers. If I look carefully I can still see a pincer and nearby his bright green eyes. “We must all find o-o-o-our own way and we can’t all be m-m-mantises,” he whispers.

I turn back to the trail and make my way towards the immense tall plants, until I can no longer see the sun when I look up. The great petals diffuse the light overhead, letting only a few rays break through the petals to the forest floor where I walk forward on my six legs.