Brad watched with a feeling of dread as his enormous sibling’s massive body strode into the kitchen where he hovered weakly, his wings suspending him somewhere between the tile floor and the ceiling.
Sal, who zeroed in on a shrilly, whiny buzz, chuckled at the fly, which seemed to no longer display the pep and visor from earlier.
He took a carefully aimed swing and heard a slight swoosh as the magazine slammed through the air and into the puny fly.
To say Brad felt bruised and battered would have been understatement. He’d lowered his guard and nearly been swatted like a bug by his own brother.
Indeed, the glancing blow had been enough to smack him from the air to crash roughly on the coffee table next to the useless Chronivac, the source of everything that had gone wrong after he had impulsively and unwisely used the device.
The brutal facts of his situation closed in on him. The giddy lightness and buoyancy of being a tiny winged creature vanished as he found himself stranded, overturned on his back, six tiny thread-thin legs scrambling uselessly.
He felt his strange eyes swivel in their sockets to focus his multi-faceted vision on his enormous sibling’s thunderous grimace.
He flailed his six legs, but the feeling made him think of himself as a fat, overturned beetle. “Wait!” Brad buzzed. “Don’t do anything hasty!”
As he stared up at Sal while trying to right himself he noticed that his brother was no longer holding the rolled-up magazine.
While he clung to that glimmer of hope, he saw Sal’s open hand drop toward him.
“No! What are you doing?” Brad buzzed as Sal’s enormous fingers closed around him, trapping himself inside a gigantic, sweaty fist.
Sal kept his hand curled into a fist. The housefly’s feeble buzzing barely escaped his meaty hand, but he could feel the insect’s fuzzy form tickling his palm as it struggled in his tight grasp.
“Relax, bug.” Sal spoke aloud as he moved through his brother’s home, approaching the front door. “I don’t have the heart to finish off such a determined survivor. We’ll just release you outside where you won’t bother anybody.”