Brad’s new wings carried him near the enormous bar, a monolith of darkly polished wood and dull brass. He zipped past one of the shirtless bartenders zesting a lemon rind into one of the bar’s specialty cocktails. Acidic droplets from the lemon zest screamed at his senses, which were also tuned intently to the scent of the bartender’s sweat and cologne. A strange excitement much like the stirring of arousal tickled his tiny addled brain.
His intricate compound eyes provided the transformed man with nearly a 360-degree field of view. He could even see behind him, although the sensation was rather disorienting and confusing as he tried to scan the bar’s mammoth patrons, hoping to locate his friend Karam. As he flew away from the bar, however, he got an excellent backward glimpse of the bartender and his chiseled pecs.
On his tiny, amazing fly wings, Brad had followed the huge jeweler into the bar, allowing optimism to blossom that he could, although the means to do so remained elusive, make contact with the man.
With his wings, his lack of size was not a decisive factor. He still believed, perhaps with undue optimism, he could get himself out of the mess of his own making.
Although Brad was a great distance from home now, trapped in his new alien form, and rapidly running out of possibilities, Karam’s presence had seemed like a fateful coincidence until he lost sight of the giant man in the crowd inside the bar.
Now everyone looked gigantic from Brad’s lowly perspective as a mere insect, barely six millimeters in length. He felt terrified as he had to weave among colossi as a mere bug.
But he told himself he was better off than 24 hours earlier when he had still been trapped in the neighbor’s pool filter. Of course, his home had been right next door. He could already have been back with Mark, devising a way to communicate with his hubby, if he hadn’t suffered the bad luck of getting tossed out with other garbage and sent off across San Francisco in the cavernous confines of a sanitation truck.
The buzz of his wings... HIS wings... he still found that just too amazing... drew him from his thoughts. The lights, the noises, the smells, everything conspired to overwhelm his strange new senses. He altered course, headed back toward the bar, and came to rest, six claw-tipped spiky limbs clinging to the lip of a transparent glass, feeling the need to marshal his reserves and regain some equilibrium.
Unfortunately, his buzz had drawn the ire and attention of the bartender. The bearded, shirtless man, who looked in his late twenties, was busy making cocktails, pouring beers and providing other beverages and didn’t have any time for a pesky fly.
He raised a seltzer bottle and sprayed in the direction of the insect as soon as he saw it touch down for a landing on one of the clean glasses. His face registered gloating triumph when he knocked the foul fly off its perch.
At that moment, a customer demanded his attention, and he turned away from the bedraggled, trapped fly. The jet of carbonated water had stunned Brad, knocking him down into the deep interior of the gleaming glass tower.
“Fuck!” He scrambled to regain his footing, but another bartender needed some glasses and reached for Brad’s glass and an adjacent one.
“Wait!” Brad buzzed. “What are you doing? No….”
An amber flood surged into the glass from an arching tap. Brad’s senses detected the sweet beer even before the flood surged around him and swept him into a swirling maelstrom.
The bartender filled both glasses and placed them on a tray for a waiting server. Brad managed to break the surface, but found himself enveloped in a bubbly froth as his strange eyes delivered a cyclone of images of the handsome college-age server who whisked the tray, the beers and one unnoticed tiny insect deeper into the crowded bar.
Brad, despite his best efforts, found that flies swim with much less agility than they fly. He kept sinking into the sudsy layer of bubbles that rested atop the beer in the tall glass.
He gave his wings a try, but the sodden wings were weighted down with seltzer water and beer. The best he could manage was a feeble buzz that spun him in an erratic circle through the foam.
“Help!” Brad tried to alert the handsome server. “Down here! In the glass!”
An enormous hand wrapped around his glass and with no visible effort whatsoever lifted the tower off the tray and onto a table.
Brad’s compound eyes gazed upward and beheld the seated mountainous forms of Karam and another man behind him at another table.
“Karam!” Brad tried to swim through the frothy layer of suds. “It’s me!”
Based on their expressions, the men seemed at odds. The other man, although unimaginably larger than Brad’s tiny housefly body, looked much smaller and less massive than Karam.
Brad buzzed again and propelled his sopping wet fly form through the suds, creating a small channel through the bubbles.
He should have been more focused on the table that had received his glass.
He swiveled his eyes and saw two young men looming over him. One of the handsome men happened to glance downward.
His eyes looked down, into the glass, and saw Brad, or rather a stranded fly.
“Yes!” Brad celebrated.
But the man did nothing, even as the other man at the table wrapped a huge hand around his glass… the glass containing the unnoticed insect.
“Can we just drink and agree to disagree?”
The words came from the man lifting the glass, directed toward his companion as he held the glass suspended between the tabletop and his face.
“Karam! Karam!” Brad buzzed desperately. He tried to look backward through the glass to see if he could see the giant jeweler.
But most of his view was now blocked by the hand wrapped around the glass. He did see a distorted image, but felt a chill to see the man who had noticed him smiling.
“Certainly,” the other man said, raising his own glass. “Cheers.”
He clinked his glass against his partners, eager to see if his oblivious friend would notice the bug swimming in his beer.
“No!” Brad cried as the unknown man tilted the glass back. His wide open mouth gave the terrified insect an unavoidable view of a gaping maw and a dark abyss at the back of the deep throat.
“No! No! No!” Brad cried, managing to look through the glass and see Karam seated a few feet away even as a stranger prepared to swallow Brad. “Let me out! Please don’t…”
A farther tilt and a flood of beer carried Brad into the cavernous mouth. In his panic, he got his wings to work, in time for the huge man to close his mouth and swallow.
In the dark, the insect bumped against the roof of the giant man’s mouth and dropped onto his massive and muscular tongue
The man swallowed.
The indescribable panic that ensued for the man in housefly form endured only briefly. Brad’s insignificant form proved no match for the routine biological processes and their elements that the stranger’s actions introduced to him.
In perhaps a measure of karma, the man did have an upset stomach the next day.