Brad woke in a sweltering hell, drowning in a rancid swamp, other drowning insects clawing, clinging, climbing on each other to get their way out of the immediate danger posed by the quagmire.
He flashed to a recent memory… a memory of landing near a puddle of horse urine after exiting the monolithic barn. He recalled sinking his proboscis into the foamy edge of the puddle. Then, everything had gone blank.
Wings on another fly buzzed shrilly next to him, jarring him away from his recollection of the scene by the side of the puddle. Brad shoved away the other bug and continued piecing together his scattered memories.
He remembered a shadow cast by an attendant at the stables where the horses for the San Francisco Mounted Patrol were kept. The stable groom in one consequential moment had erased the puddle with a pail of sand, burying some of the unfortunate insects at the same time.
Brad had been one of the lucky ones, flying free of the avalanche of sand in the nick of time.
Spared the fate of being buried alive, he hovered in place.
“Focus!” Brad told himself.
FOOD! His insect body demanded.
A cleverly baited trap had tantalized his fly senses. His fly’s wiring overrode Brad’s need to focus in favor of the more basic drive to instantly respond to any suggestion of food, which usually came from a smell that would have been stomach-churning for human Brad.
The awful smell of his current hell overwhelmed him again. He had blacked out again, waking to new levels of horror. Hundreds of insect corpses littered the bottom of a transparent plastic bag.
Brad clung to the plastic wall. There had to be a way out!
Exploring the interior of the plastic trap, he found a single hole and tried to hover beneath it.
“Just a little higher,” he told himself as he tried to fly straight upward.
More flies forcing their way inside dropped on him.
A babel of buzzing enveloped him in a nearly impenetrable bubble of white noise that blocked out everything but the sound of the swarm.
How long had he been trapped? He struggled to think.
He had arrived at the stable in late morning two days ago. By mid-afternoon, or only about an hour after the eradication of the puddle, the dominance of his fly instincts had landed him on a dazzling white surface. He remembered an irresistible urge to push his way through a hole and, with a sudden drop and plop, he had splashed into a rancid-smelling reservoir of liquid. Corpses of other flies floated just beneath the surface of the foul liquid.
He had now spent two days imprisoned in the trap, a deceptively simple contraption designed as the most efficient means to eliminate large numbers of flies from environments — stables, barns, farms — where they congregated.
He was one of a multitude that formed a writhing mass of desperate tiny creatures, their ranks continually increasing as the foul-smelling bait inside the bag constantly lured even more flies inside the trap.
He buzzed his wings and battered against the thin sheet of plastic.
“No!” Brad produced a mental scream of disbelief and unacceptance after spending two days trying to escape. He couldn’t be defeated by something as mundane as a plastic bag!
Another fly tumbling into the interior of the smelly trap collided with him. Its legs fastened on him, dragging Brad back down into the morass of dead or dying flies. He panicked, clawing blindly, as other flies latched on with their spike-tipped limbs and dragged him deeper.
The trap, a plastic bag with a pop-up plastic lid with a few holes cut into the design to facilitate entry and obstruct escapes, dangled from a low branch of a tree planted a few yards from the horse barn. A simple means of pest control, but one that Brad had nevertheless blundered inside, albeit while his fly instincts had been in control.
Once a week, an employee with the stable disposed of the traps and replaced them with fresh ones in a never-ending battle to control the flies and other pests naturally attracted to the stables.
A bedraggled little fly eventually climbed back out of the muck and clung with desperation to the interior of the plastic bag. The trap that held Brad was scheduled for replacement in three more days, but the unfortunate physicist didn’t survive to see it. He succumbed overnight on his fourth day in the trap and nine days after transforming into a housefly. He expired with hundreds of other insects in the diabolically simple but effective trap and no one was ever the wiser about why he had suddenly disappeared.