You are ten years old and a fly zips around you and you scream that it’s a bee. You cover your head and scream and scream until your mother swats the fly against the wall and it falls, dead. She tells you to look at it and you do, and it is not a bee, it is just a fly.
You are thirty years old and you hear a fly buzz-buzz-buzzing against a window. You sigh and fetch the fly swat, but it’s such a tiny thing. You open the window and it goes the other way. It takes half an hour to coax the fly out and you look at the swat, next time you’ll save yourself some time.
You are sixty years old and your neighbour tells you that he had a fly stuck in the bathroom last night. It’s been so long since you’ve felt harassed by a fly and you say so; he agrees, he hasn’t had to bother with flies for so long. You swap stories, you and the bee-that-was-a-fly and he with a tale of a bin full of maggots. You shudder and decide you’d be okay if you never saw a fly again.
You are eighty years old and you read a story to your granddaughter. She points at a picture of a fly and asks you, What’s that? You tell her that it’s a fly, but she has never seen one, so you tell her it is a bug, like a spider, but it flies around. She asks whether they bite, and you say, No, but I was scared of them when I was little. She giggles, Why? And you tell her about the fly, and the bee, and she asks what a bee is. And you wish you could see a fly again.
Han Noss is a queer, neurodivergent non-binary writer from England. They co-host the Flash Fiction writing group within London Writers’ Salon. Outside of writing, they work as a freelance proofreader, and seek to make the book and publishing industries more inclusive and accessible to queer and neurodivergent people.
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