A fly buzzed around the heads of Mark and Russ as the two neighbors stood in Russ’s bountiful organic garden. The man’s effort thrived thanks to eco-friendly fertilizers, non-GMO seeds and plants, even “green” compatible pest control methods.
While not a gardener himself, Mark was a captive audience and Russ loved to point out the latest additions to his garden. The fly, as insects invariably do, made a nuisance of itself as it veered from one enormous head to the other, apparently driven by random movement.
A row of staked tomatoes provided his point of pride at the moment. “You’ve never tasted tomatoes like these! And blight-resistant…”
The two men looked unbelievably enormous to the tiny winged bug that continued to flit around their heads. With a body a mere quarter-inch in size and twitching wings that spanned barely half an inch, the little fly didn’t even figure into their notice. Had it been a potential pest to his tomatoes, that might have drawn Russ’s attention.
A twitch of the right wing muscles zoomed the insect closer to an enormous face. Ears and nostrils were caverns the insect could have entered freely, if it had been bent on suicide.
The smart thing to do, the sane thing to do, would be to put some distance between the titanic men and itself.
But the fly needed Mark.
It needed him to return home, open the front door, and permit the tiny fly to re-enter the colossal house.
So, the fly buzzed in circles around the two planetoid humans, assuming an insignificant orbit as it revolved around them, its strange compound eyes offering a view like a child’s kaleidoscope toy of splintered versions of the same image.
The scent of salty sweat as the men perspired in the hot sun tormented the fly’s finely attuned senses, springing into life desperate hungers that tempted the insect to move closer to the giants, perhaps even chance a landing on a bare shoulder or forearm.
Before the insect could even think of doing so, a dark hand swooped from on high, but the insect’s remarkable vision, not to mention some extra sensory allocations not available to a human, allowed it to dodge the aggravated blow, although its wings felt the turbulence left in the wake of the man’s attempt to deal with the tiny pest that made its presence known intermittently.
So, for Brad Rivera-Walters, it had come to this. Trying to evade his own neighbor’s attempt to swat and smush him while his own husband looked on with seeming indifference.
“Mark!” The tiny fly buzzed its wings furiously, making a futile effort to make itself heard, but its mouthparts and strange, elephantine proboscis produced no actual words.
“Russ! Help me! It’s me! Brad!”
Those were the equivalent of words he had been mentally screaming for hours.
He needed a rest.
Brad flew to a skyscraper-tall stake used to support one of Russ’s prize-winning tomatoes and perched there.