THE FLY

One afternoon at the store my boss offered half of her barbecue beef sandwich. She had bought it up the street at a new restaurant and she couldn’t finish it.  “But it’s good,” she told me. “ You’ll like it.”

I  was happily chowing away when I stopped to re-arrange it.  I lifted up the bun and out stepped a fly.

He had been happily gorging on the sandwich at the same time as me. Slapping his belly with both hands, he contentedly exhaled. “Ahhhh!”

Then after a couple of false starts, he managed to lift his overloaded carcass into the air and flew away.

I once worked at a horse ranch for a few months. We were re-doing the stalls, lining the interiors with extra wood. But the wood and nails were substandard, the boards were prone to splitting and the nails prone to bending. I was pulling a bent nail out of a board when the hammer slipped away and I hit myself right in the front teeth.

Without a sound, refusing to acknowledge the extreme pain I was in, I walked away. Walked out of the barn where I was working with the owner’s daughter and into the next barn over. She didn’t even know anything had happened until I told her about it later.

That’s how I reacted with the fly. I put the sandwich down and just walked away, refusing to acknowledge what I had just seen.

You don’t believe me? I know what I saw.