CHIP

There were so many of them. For a second, one was isolated above Gil, as if frozen in the air, near enough for him to study. That’s when Gil came to the realization.

It seemed unlikely, even absurd: this younger one was bigger than Gil. Yet he could have sworn that the kid was colored in a weird way, had a fringe that reminded him of…and then the others swarmed away, and the kid flew with them, not too fast to keep Gil from following, using the kid’s weird colors as a way to keep up, the colors a beacon, a light that led him on.

The colors reminded him of the boy’s mother, if in fact she could have been the boy’s mother, which was the unlikely, even absurd part. While a green-brown fringe was common among females, they were unheard-of in males, and this was why Gil thought the boy might have been Sally’s son, and so his own.

(Gil hadn’t named her Sally; I had. I was imagining what Gil thought as I imagined his name, because no one knows how or even if an insect thinks, let alone one as far down the food chain as Gil, who was a yellow-golden dung fly.)

Gil followed the younger, bigger, brightly-colored dung fly, and the pursuit led him into the past, as if their beating wings had wiped away the present. There Gil had been moving after other flies, too, most of whom now long dead, for their life spans were only one or two months. Gil was nearing his own end, and he knew it—I imagine—and this made him curious, if not desperate, to know what offspring he might be leaving behind.

In this past flight, he had been acting on instinct and not curiosity, heading to the same place the younger fly was now, a dung pile left by a cow on a farm in upstate New York. As he approached it, Gil slowed, for he had seen who was waiting.

Many other males hovered above or had landed upon the steaming pile. (Pat? Pad? Whatever was the most common term. Chip? No, that meant dead, done, and dried-up. Chip off the old block! Gil’s mind was wandering.) Most, if not all, were larger than Gil; he felt a familiar, seasonal fear start to fill his modest frame. Yet he could not turn back; he was propelled ahead by an imperative in himself: the only reason he existed? It gave him no pleasure, he felt just obligation—no, that was a choice—only obedience, as he directed himself down, down, down into the miasma of other flies.

Even though Gil was a diminutive model, his instinct to reproduce was no less enormous than males of larger size, so his challenge was greater than theirs and his chance of success much lower.

“Hey! Look who’s here!”

That’s what one fly would have yelled if he could have said something and not just buzzed, if he could even do that. In any case, alighting upon the field of feces (it looked as big as a field to him), Gil was immediately waylaid by a bully who identified him as a target easy to take down.

And take down Gil he did, jumping onto his back, around which he wrapped with tentacle arms. Gil tried to wiggle free, but this only encouraged his attacker to attach himself more tightly, making Gil unable to move, let alone fight back. Like a wrestler (the idea of which he was utterly ignorant), the larger fly flipped Gil over, so that he was splayed upon the rich, soft and redolent surface, his belly exposed, his limbs twitching pointlessly. Then, his tentacles more and more resembling human arms, the bully picked up Gil like a bartender booting a customer (another comparison of which flies were ignorant, as might be young readers) and tossed the smaller specimen a shouting distance from where they were. 

Gil’s tiny body twirled in the air until he was right-side up, when he landed and skidded to a stop on the dung. As his eyes cleared, he saw before him a familiar, chaotic tableau: an orgy on the sponge of the cow’s plop, scores of male flies quivering and twitching into females from behind, occasionally with enough force to push the females forward. This mass was depositing its genetic material upon another kind of deposit, the past, present and future merging as they created a new crop of creatures on a bigger creature’s crap.

Of course, Gil would not be taking part: he was prevented by the physical fact of his size. It was an unmistakable sign of weakness to his brawny competitors, who had not been outfitted with any sense of fairness and bore only the most basic and brutal need to copulate, if that’s what you could even call what they were doing. Yet Gil knew he had not been singled out. Even those who had been chosen by females for this function (and who was choosing and not merely being forced was unclear) had to fight to finish. They were often interrupted mid-act, not by a courteous tap to “cut in”, but by other aggressors’ smash-and-grabs to replace the rutting flies with themselves, sometimes accidentally and fatally puncturing the female in the process. Elsewhere, the fierce need to fornicate made males mount other males—whether from confusion or indiscriminate desire—which caused still more fights, the dung hosting a donnybrook of dominance no matter where one looked.

Gil looked everywhere, for he was desperate to escape. He’d given up getting anything out of or putting anything into this barbaric breeding ground. Yet he had to schedule his move for the few seconds when he wasn’t being scouted for attack, when males were distracted by the arrival of new females. In this brief window, he soon took off from the battlefield, leaving the sights, sounds and smells of desire, defecation and death below.

For awhile, he merely floated, relieved to be alive. And “floated” was appropriate, as this was officially what he was called now, a floater, a male displaced from the main mating arena of fresh cow dung. He never would get used to being this, yet it was his lot in life. In the past, Gil had settled for mating instead on everything, from slime molds to fungi to sewage, with whatever females would join him. This day, though, had been different. This day, having been made hungry by being harassed, jumped and pummeled, Gil sensed the presence of food underneath him: a composting apple squashed flat upon the ground.

Gil descended upon it. He began nibbling tiny and tasty bits of petrifying and putrefying citrus. There were others near him who had had the same idea. Gil ignored them, so engaged was he by this opportunity, which was such a relief from his (and I wish he could have appreciated the pun) recent fruitless pursuit. Only when he’d had his fill did he look up and, with a start, notice someone beside him.

It was a female, bigger (of course) than Gil. She had the green-brown fringe of her gender and, like the rest, as well, was duller overall than he. Still, the shifting midday sun did for her what her own nature could not, illuminated her: she seemed to spray rays in all directions. She was—I decided—named Sally.

Gil assumed that Sally had come there for the same reason he had, to flee the oppressive atmosphere of the dung pile. While bigger males there may have had more generous testes that could dispense stronger sperm in Sally, they could also harm or kill her in their attempt to protect her from their competitors. Plus, there were so many on the dung that Sally had no ability or time to choose for herself. Gil perceived this in the way she now turned and offered herself to him.

He guessed that Sally had had many males on the dung before arriving at the apple, and she knew what she did not want. Her last lover, to use the word loosely, would provide eighty percent of her offspring. She had decided it would be Gil, whose small stature suggested he would be gentle, a trait she wished desperately to pass on.

Gil pushed the lower part of his abdomen against the higher part of hers. His front legs rested on her wings; his middle legs hung alongside while his rear legs gripped the base of Sally’s body. She let it happen, wanted it to happen: they were linked by their contempt for cruelty, their taste for tenderness, their sense that the other was the same, their need to create more creatures like them, to further the feeling of love in the world. 

Sally pressed herself into Gil to accept the pumping release of his sperm, the way to add this information to others. The event lasted two hours, the sweet scent of rotting seeds in the air all along. They knew nothing about time, in this way adding and eliminating life as they loved each other, or whatever they were doing that day on an apple instead of on dung.

Afterwards, there were no exhales or after-glow, no cigarette or glass of wine, not even an acknowledgment of the experience or of the other’s existence. The last act Gil performed in Sally’s presence was to fly away, while she went to deposit a compassionate and fertilized future into the sinking and stinking spoilage underneath. 

Now Gil trailed who he felt was that future. The fact that the boy brandished Sally’s green-brown fringe convinced him that the two had succeeded in their unspoken scheme to merge male and female, to make the next generation gentler. (Swiftly reproducing life forms, like flies, evolved more swiftly. Even months could bring big changes: the future was never far away!) The larger, younger male dung fly was on the edge of escaping, yet compelled by an irrational parental instinct and the excitement it instilled, Gil kept pace.

“Wait!” Gil cried or buzzed, but the other couldn’t hear. Maybe Gil didn’t want him to wait, wanted the positive progress he had put in place to occur, even or especially without him. 

The younger fly did slow then, but not in response to Gil’s yelled request. Below, he had spied the dung pile where he and so many others were headed. Gil brought up the rear of their convoy and began to sink, never losing sight of his and Sally’s beautiful son. (I’ve named the kid Chip.)

The pile was almost identical to the one from which he and Sally had bolted months before. It was the same riot of male flies impatiently waiting to conquer females and combat and kill their competition. The sky was so smeared with them that Gil could barely see as he descended.

He saw enough to see the sun shine on and brighten his son’s fringe as it had once done Sally’s. As if the light was a ladder, Gil rappelled it toward the barely moving body of his boy. Chip had started to stop in the packed crowd of assaulting suitors.

Chip approached a male fly about to mount a female. Then Gil and Sally’s son—in fact it was not their son but my figment of a male fly that was existent always, this aspect of males, anyway, always existent—brutally dropped and disabled the other. Chip impaled him with his tentacles, spraying the other’s insides all over himself, covering and camouflaging his mere fluke of a female fringe, hiding it as cops flip their badges to hide their identities when they’re about to beat someone. After Gil cried out for him to stop, Chip turned and saw him. Then he began to advance on the old runt who would be no opponent for him at all.