Brad flew toward the light. At maximum speed, which he had obtained thanks to his impetus to get away from Jim and Sal, his wings moved his tiny body through the air at a top speed of about 10 miles per hour.
“A little further,” Brad thought as he dived steeply toward the rectangle of light that represented freedom outside the house.
BANG!
Hitting the pane of glass at full speed hurt like hell. Worse, his stunned body fell like a stone, making a small, unnoticed plop into a lake of soapy water held within a soaking casserole dish that had been in the sink since a previous meal in the Rivera-Walters household.
Brad managed a pained mental groan and vibrated his wings weakly. The window – it had been open! He was certain of it. Either his father or sibling must have closed it and he had collided with the invisible barrier and knocked himself nearly senseless.
“Where the hell did it go?” Brad’s father thundered far above the sink, having lost track of the household pest. “Did you see?”
“No papi,” Sal answered, moving into view.
From below, the dazed insect tried to focus its strange eyes on its two giant human relatives. He felt strange. His weak buzzing of his wings in the soapy water came to a standstill like a motor running out of gas.
The detergent soap reacted with the water molecules and slowly began to suffocate the saturated fly.
He struggled to swim. “Got…to…get…out…” Brad realized as he tried to move toward the greasy slope of the enormous dish.
“Betcha that last swipe got the sucker,” Sal theorized.
Jim looked skeptical as he stood in front of the sink and turned on a faucet and grabbed the dish detergent to wash his hands, instantly adding more soap and water to the filled casserole dish.
“Just let me wash up and we’ll go,” he told his son, not noticing as a tiny housefly got swept out of the dish and spun down the open drain.
“Papi! No!” Brad tried to scream as the stream from his father’s vigorous hand washing sucked him into the drain and then the sink’s plumbing.
Soon after, Jim and Sal departed, leaving behind an eerily silent house.
By the time Mark, ready with an apology for his delay, returned to the empty house, no clue to his transformed spouse’s fate remained. Of course, Mark had planned to embellish rather than admit he had run into a co-worker from the high school and spent nearly 20 minutes discussing their predictions for the weekend’s big games before he even approached the store cashier with the batteries. As it turned out, his well-rehearsed speech went ungiven as he searched the house for the fly.