The Bluebottle

A little,fat buzzing blue-bottle was constantly circumnavigating her and occasionally making a dart towards the sweet,brown contents of her sherry glass.

At first it had merely irritated her; flying in through a crack in the sky-blue window frame, carrying the compacted noise of the bustling, miserable,industrial world in with it. The more she focused upon it, however, the more it grew in significance like some dark,deadly omen. Before long it had mutated into more than an ordinary blue-bottle; now it was a period escaped from one of the pages of her poetry anthology; a living speck of dirt that would skillfully evade any attempt to remove it; a little vampire draining all the joy from the room with its whining, tiny, electric vacuum cleaner.

This last thought made her smile but, as if the little bugs super-sensitive, miniature antennae had picked up the loud creak of her giant, moving lips, it made a head-long,diagonal lunge at her face, brushing her nose briefly with its vibrating fuzz before returning to its original circular flight pattern.

"Bastard!", yelled Eileen, bolting reflexively upright; spilling sherry onto her Victorian floral patterned living-room carpet. "That's it", she shouted determinedly, "your days are numbered,my friend".

Rising awkwardly, falling back down and then rising awkwardly again, she prepared for swift vengeance; the liquor was making her feel like Jupiter ready to smash an annoying Titan as she scanned the room for a newspaper or magazine to roll into a convenient thunderbolt.

Close at hand she found a copy of a weekly woman's magazine and, snatching it up, gazed briefly at the cover which advertised "The ultimate horoscope" and a true life confession of "How I survived the marriage from hell" before rolling it up into a rudimentary fly-swatter. With her other hand she grabbed hold of an aerosol can of "Hawaiian Breeze" air freshener, squeezing out a few gushes of fragrant smelling vapor in order to test its fire-power.

Now, lumbering towards the center of the room she took position and turning in an anti-clockwise direction she charted, mentally, the course of the offending insect, visualizing the pattern of its rotation as a pie-chart and carving out a quarter at which she would lay ambush to it.

The first shot of her aerosol spray hit the fly directly in its rear, propelling it like a strong gust of wind into a corner of the room; exactly where she wanted it. Swiftly, she moved to the second phase of her strategy; deploying the rolled up magazine like a cudgel, bludgeoning the wall left and right; cutting off the helpless bluebottle’s every avenue of escape.

"Don't kill me ", it said, "please!".

Eileen was stunned, her mouth gaping with shock and awe, her eyes irremovably glued upon the little black creature that was now twitching nervously upon the wall. 'Did I just hear that fly talk',she asked herself, 'no,surely not'.

Then it talked again.

"If you kill me", it pleaded, "You will never know the secret I keep".

Eileen lowered her arms,overpowered by the strangeness of this incident, almost flinching with the enormity of this blow upon her ordinary concept of reality. Ofcourse, normally she may have attributed it to the sherry and amiltryptiline that was fogging up her thought processes but at that moment she was fully convinced that she had entered a strange parallel universe where bluebottles were gifted with the power of human speech.

There could be no other explanation for why this grotesque little creature, who was rapidly growing within her minds eye to the size of a small black cat, was speaking to her in that strange sinister lisping voice which, when she thought about it, sounded almost like Peter Lorre in Casablanca and what was it saying to her - a secret?.

"You are curious", it continued, "I have quite a nose for all varieties of dark, festering thought. I can smell your worries and fears."

"No.",she said turning away from the little beast as if from a nauseous odor, "I don't want to know.
It will be something horrific. Don't tell me!".

The bluebottle was undeterred,pursuing her as she retreated to the sanctuary of her green leather couch, covering her ears and cowering as if pursued by an angry swarm of bees.

"You are not curious?", it said, slightly disappointed, "Then I shall whet your appetite".

It buzzed round infront of her until it settled upon her black polyester skirt. "It is about your loving,faithful husband", said the fly with a sman.

Her face, which had been momentarily buried in her hands, looked up,revealing the glow of wetness upon her reddened cheeks from a few tears shed unconsciously, "my husband", she asked, "Andrew",giving her husbands name in an astonished tone.

"Yesss", said the fly,suddenly excited by the act of relaying whatever hurtful secret it possessed, "I saw your Andrew as I was perched upside down upon your bedroom ceiling and lying beside him,in your bed I saw a woman and it was not you. It was a much younger,much slimmer girl than you".

"Somebody else", muttered Eileen,more to herself than to the fly, "I don't believe it", she said although inside her she thought it something very believable.

"I saw her reflected in every little facet of my glimmering eye",goaded the fly,"Blonde,young,firm.
I even flew down upon her back at one point and heard the exhiliration in his tired voice as he called her name".

"Her name? What is her name?", asked Eileen foolishly beginning to see the little ugly creature upon her lap as a voice that she could trust.

"Samantha ! Oh Samantha!", gasped the bluebottle in an imitation of her husbands alleged rapturous exclamation,which coming from the tiny buzzing insect sounded more like an old,wheezing chest.

"Samantha?",asked Eileen, that name now went running along the dark,dusty corridors of her memory until able to discover the secret filing room of recognition, "Yes. He does have a receptionist called Samantha", she said,her eyes filling with a glow of sudden understanding. "A young trollop. It's well known in the village what sort of character she is".

"A poor girl", said the fly,his voice suddenly shifting like a violin into a minor key, "An ignorant wretch exploited by a callous,
controlling man”.

“Oh, I can well believe that”,she said, thinking about the way she herself had had her life ruined by her husband.

“But that’s not all”, said the fly settling upon the bridge of her nose so that she could see its hideous twitching face and its two geodesic eyes like horrific disco globes and its two little black pipe cleaner hands which it rubbed together in glee, “The two of them have been planning to do something awful to you; to the poor doctors crazy wife that makes his life a hell with her paranoia and her neurosis and her fits of hysteria. Your last failed suicide attempt gave him that idea”.

She suddenly felt an urge to wipe her husbands sinister grinning face from her head but the sherry and the pills were also making her drowsy and why was she now in the kitchen and why was the cooks knife pressing its handle into her hand. The flickering,buzzing strip lighting over her head was dancing in a
wind-mill motion and she laughed as she pictured her husband and his harlot with their pig heads on platters.

Now she was infront of the back door with her cooks knife raised high, ready to cut open his cheating heart like a haggis at a burns supper. Now she could hear his silver Mazda pulling into the driveway, crunching gravel under its tyres. Now she saw his blurred face through the frosted glass of the door and heard his key rattle in the lock.

The carrot struck three times at his heart but the point of the orange vegetable wouldn’t penetrate; then,her mental fog starting to lift, she realized that it was a carrot in her hand and not a carving knife and that,rather than lying on the doorstep in a pool of blood, her husband was merely staring at her in bemusement and “What’s Up, Doc?” was all she could think of to say.

“I bought you some cakes from the bakery”, he replied, holding up an opened white box full of cream cakes and chocolate eclairs and then she saw the monstrous fly sitting upon one of the cakes with its feet stuck in a quagmire of chocolate icing and her mind suddenly became a lot clearer even though she was very tired.

“Oh!”, said her husband, noticing the fly, “I’m sorry. I’ll throw that one away”.

“Don’t worry”, she said, kissing him and yawning, “I can’t eat them anyway, I’m on a diet and it’s the thought that counts”.