Tito hadn't been happy to get the call from Sal. Not that he was avoiding Sal, but dammit! He had just settled on the sofa for an afternoon nap after finding his roommates absent from the apartment, a rare occurrence.
He scratched at his beard stubble, three days worth at least, and then lifted his hand and dug into his buzz cut scalp with the same languid effort. He shifted and sat up on the sofa, leaning forward, stretching the geometric swirls on the tattoo of his left bicep. He was a messy but really built LatinX hunk who even managed to steal some limelight from Brad’s handsome, masculine brother.
He listened to Sal, who sounded rattled as he told Tito he needed his help and gave him an address.
"Mejor ser importante," Tito mumbled as he got to his feet, agreed to meet Sal, staggered across the room, and entered his bedroom to get dressed.
Sal had sounded both evasive and freaked out during the phone call, but all he would say was that he needed Tito's expertise. So, despite his internal grumbling, he finished pulling on some clothes (shorts, sneakers, wife-beater black tank) and walked through his apartment. He stopped off in the kitchen and grabbed his wallet and bike keys off the counter.
Outside in the apartment complex parking lot, he retrieved his helmet as he mounted his electric blue Yamaha. The bike was his prized possession. He revved the engine and commenced his 15-minute bike ride to meet Sal.
Brad’s time as a fly was advancing without undue incident. So far, he had feasted on garbage in an open trash can at a neighborhood home. His fly instincts, in total disregard to Brad’s gay orientation, even had him attempt a mating with a female housefly encountered inside the same litter-strewn trash can. On top of an oozing banana peel draped over other ripe garbage, they were making good headway when an alpha male housefly rammed into their coupling, dislodged Brad’s fly body, and took over without any protests from the female insect.
If not for that interruption, Brad’s path might never have intersected with Tito’s. Housefly sex can typically last a couple of hours. If not for being dislodged, little fly Brad might still have been getting his rocks off when Tito arrived as Sal’s tech reinforcement for the problem of dealing with a sibling who had apparently changed himself into a fly.
Well fed and carefree, Brad buzzed away from the garbage bin, flying back across the street toward his former home. He didn’t recognize the towering structure. His new housefly brain was far too primitive for that. The house might as well have been a hillside or mountain for the little bug.
He wasn’t even having little housefly thoughts. He was just existing, flying through the air until…SPLAT!
Brad’s meandering flight across the street ended abruptly when the visor of Tito’s motorcycle helmet impacted the flying insect at a speed of 45 miles per hour as Tito revved the engine on the incline toward the address that Sal had given him.
Tito parked his bike at the curb and removed his helmet, pausing to examine the bug’s splattered remains. The splat had been just significant enough to register as a disgusting happenstance. Not that he cared, but even if he had tried, it would have been impossible to guess what sort of bug had just perished on the plexiglass visor.
He would certainly not have guessed that a housefly, formerly a physicist and his best friend’s brother, had bit it against his helmet.
Yet even when he discovered the reason for Sal’s frantic call, he never really connected the dots. For Tito, the collision had just been one more bug on the windshield of life.