In a flurry of panicked thoughts, Brad clambered over the vast glass surface of his living room coffee table, crawling on six legs as he tried to get his wings to work.
He had taken quite the walloping from the rolled-up magazine in his brother’s hand. Each time he twitched the muscles on his back to activate the wings, they buzzed unproductively.
A shadow passed over him. Sal, widened his stance, looming over the tabletop, magazine still rolled in his right hand, as a face hardened with a grimace of disgust realised the insect remained alive and kicking.
Brad crawled to the side of the Chronivac. The powerless device of chrome and ceramics felt cold, but it could be brought back to life…
“Mark! Where are you?” Brad thought as he tracked his brother’s looming form with his two red compound eyes, huge in the amount of space they occupied on his new “face.” His husband should have been back with the batteries by now.
Sal’s arm moved, prompting Brad to scramble onto the surface of the Chonivac. Sal stopped himself when he saw the pest had taken up a position on the unfamiliar device. He didn’t want to splatter it all over the device. It looked expensive and he didn’t want to catch hell from Brad.
“Get off there!” Sal said, using his free hand to get fingers wrapped around the device to lift it off the tabletop.
Brad skittered over the smooth surface of the device, but got a leg hooked into a groove between frame and screen and held on for the ride.
Seeing the fly grasping the screen, Sal shook the device, trying to dislodge the insect.
“Sal! It’s me!” Brad buzzed through the chaos as Sal’s powerful action tried to shake him free. “Don’t!”
With a buzzing scream, Brad felt himself dislodged and speeding through the air. Muscles twitched and his wings worked.
A welcome sense of buoyancy returned as he zoomed around the room, feeling as light as air until a tower of newsprint sliced the air near him, disrupting his flight with waves of turbulence.
“Fucking pest!” Sal cursed after missing the fly a second time. “No wonder Papi hates these fuckers so much!”
“No! I’m not a fly!” Brad, who had won the struggle to smooth out his flight, screamed wordlessly. “Just go! Please go.”
Sal took another swing, but without doing any physical harm. Mentally, though, Brad was freaking out. He didn’t want to get crushed by his own brother.
Brad realised that Sal’s reach was a lot to overcome. Unless…
Brad zipped closer, ducking beneath another swing of the magazine, then rising to a level right in front of Sal’s shocked face.
“Sal! It’s me.” Brad buzzed closer, right in front of the bridge of Sal’s nose. “It’s Brad!”
As he had hoped, Sal’s swings were now really just frustrated failings as Brad began to buzz an orbit around Sal’s enormous head.
The fly’s actions prompted Sal to dash across the room, bumping the coffee table and nearly tripping himself in the process. When he regained his balance, he dropped the magazine on the table and rubbed his sore shin, cursing louder as he heard a buzz continue to encircle his head as Brad stuck close, believing his strategy was working.
His irritated sibling heard the change in the buzz before Brad even recognised what was happening. The steady drone of the wings dipped in intensity.
“Tiring yourself out sucker?” Sal twisted, trying to locate the source of the buzz.
Weakness overcame the transformed man in waves. Since he had last fed, he had been evicted from his home, then rescued after Mark had figured out what had happened with his study of the device. Then there had been the debacle with the lack of the right batteries, Mark’s departure, and then Sal’s arrival.
In the space of ten minutes, Sal had tried twice to crush him beneath heavy glossy print, succeeding in knocking him out of the air on the first occasion.
His recovery and then his subsequent evasions had burned through fuel he didn’t have to spare. His enfeebled state allowed the instincts of the fly to surface. He needed fuel and the fly buzzed away from Sal, toward the kitchen.
Sal, however, found it extremely easy to follow the fly, which flew in a haphazard, zig-zag manner.
“Damn bug looks drunk.” Sal observed aloud.
He wasn’t far off the mark. Its depleted reserves left the fly somewhat foggy-headed, befuddled and uncoordinated.
Brad was so wiped that finding the kitchen bare of any immediately noticeable sources of nourishment barely did anything to affect his emotional state.
The fact that a mammoth lumbering behemoth tracked him to the kitchen didn’t cause anything near the alarm it should have.