A housefly might be good at many things.
Swimming wasn’t one of them.
By virtue of the lightweight form, Brad stayed afloat, wings vibrating feebly, in the choppy water.
For Brad, the fact that the giant hadn’t even intended to fling him into the pool made no difference at all. If anything, it was even more humiliating as it made him realize how truly pathetic he had become.
“Help!” Brad cried silently as his wings buzzed, then fizzled. The waterlogged wings couldn’t gain the traction needed to break free of the surface of the water.
Making matters worse, the giant decided now was a good time to take a dip. Oblivious to the tiny insect floating with a modest amount of other wind-blown debris, Matteo’s huge form eased into the pool, displacing a significant amount of water that sent tiny Brad sloshing on a wave toward the side of the mammoth swimming pool.
He almost at once spied another even more immediate danger.
Rectangular cuts into the side of the pool pulled water into them. Even Brad’s puny body could feel the pull of the water’s flow as an unseen but active pool pump pulled water toward the openings. He saw some fallen leaves disappear into the shadowy cavern of the pool skimmer.
He heard the “thump, thump” of a pivoting flap that opened to let the leaves pass through. Matteo began swimming laps, which continued to churn the water in the pool into frothy waves that drove Brad ever closer to the shadowy interior of the skimmer compartment.
Suddenly, a large flap moved again, sucking in more water…and one tiny, terrified fly. There was a lurching drop and the flap slammed back into place behind him as Brad dropped into a mesh plastic basket that contained leaves, twigs and other drowned or nearly drowned bugs. A drenched moth and a large beetle floated motionless in the basket among other detritus.
Below the basket, Brad’s tiny body felt the power of a mechanical pump and panicked, thinking he would be drawn deeper into the working of the filtration system.
Overhead, a plastic roof secured the basket, which meant that, even should he manage to get his wings working, Brad couldn’t escape!
He remained with the other collected debris as Matteo enjoyed a brief swim before he emerged from the pool ready for his rendezvous with his latest suitor.
Before collecting his clothes and heading indoors, Matteo wondered if he should clean out the skimmer basket before departing. He had skipped the chore the previous day, and Paul and Ivan had both emphasized the need to keep the baskets emptied of debris.
Of course, he could simply clean the basket tomorrow morning…
On the other hand, he had a good thing going and didn’t want to fuck it up by being lazy.
A bug’s fate hinged on his decision…
…For Matteo the decision was simple. He knew how much could accumulate in one day, or one week, especially with this pool. If he left it to sit for more than a week there’d be trouble. However, he’d emptied it out on Monday morning, and with it being Sunday now he’d have at least a day before the trap had any chance of being an inconvenience for anyone involved.
With that in mind, he dried off and began dressing, reasoning he could get a shower in at this guy’s place… possibly while enjoying that very peach that had been teased before. The thought caused his cock to stir in his pants.
“Alright. Time to get mine.” Matteo chuckled, his sneakered foot smacking down on the lid to the hidden basket with a hollow thump.
And like that he traveled up the stairs of the back porch, his eyes drifting and landing on the common sight of the next door neighbor, a guy named Russ, and a friend of his that Matteo had seen a couple of times — a muscular blonde bearded man.
Normally he would have stopped to call out attention to Russ, maybe flirt a little, but the friend of his seemed upset. So Matteo traveled through the house and out the front door to claim his conquest.
None of this mattered to the small dark shape trapped within the basket, trying desperately to find a way out of the situation, out into the real world. Back into it’s home.
How much longer would Brad’s machine keep putting out its reversal pulses? Only time would tell.
In the yard next door, Mark and Russ continued their animated conversation, their voices distant rumbles of thunder that couldn’t be formed into words at this point. Nearly an hour later the two voices faded as Mark returned to his home to continue his search while Russ returned to his own home armed with a lot more detail about his neighbors’ strange and curious sex life.
Hours passed and eventually Paul and Ivan returned to their home, opting to have an outdoor dinner with the weather being so nice. Ivan, ever the pragmatist, clicked on the bug zapper that he’d hung up earlier in the year and the night was dotted with the periodic crackle of a mindless insect drawn into the light of the zapper. Unaware of how that sound, and their proximity, was affecting another waterlogged bug not far from their seating area.
Even that ended, and before long the couple returned into their home for the night. As the hours slowly ticked by night became louder on a micro level as all manner of nocturnal creatures sprung into action, living, hunting, being hunted, and a myriad of other experiences.
Eventually, the sun would rise on another day, but in the meantime another night passed that Mark hadn’t found a single sign of his missing husband.