For weeks, the fly got the better of them. When they thought it was gone it reappeared, all abuzz. That fly witnessed, first, disagreement, then yelling, then coldness, turning away, weeping, someone locked in a bathroom, a bloody nose, and hard objects breaking against walls. The fly, to its surprise, was not the target of any of these attacks, not even the last, which for the fly was a first.
“With humans,” it mused, “even more than us, every day is a struggle.”
When the woman left, the fly pondered a moment too long: go or stay?
Then the man pounced.
fiction appears in The Best Small Fictions 2016 (“First Night,” originally published in River Styx), Kenyon Review, Cimarron Review, Sou’wester, North American Review, Vestal Review, KYSO Flash, A3 Review, and other journals and anthologies published in the U.S., the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Argentina. She lives in New York City.
