Gabriel Jeroschewitz, August 1st, 2026, inspired and dedicated to, all House flies Hornby’s Fire brigade and Tom Waits
Monsieur Housefly took a breather.
It was in the kitchen where the fire started. There was an orange flame that was exploring the pantry door in the kitchen. Outside the house, the garden was settling into twilight with ladybugs on the rose bushes. Inside the house, the two children in pajamas were on the sofa with a biscuit and a rabbit who had lost an ear in the laundry. Their mother was searching for the cell phone to call the fire brigade while her husband was arriving through the back door with a water bucket.
Amidst this chaotic scene, a house fly named Buzz was hovering over the bedlam. Buzz was keeping watch over the fire, the children, and the mother, who were attempting to extinguish the kitchen fire with nothing but a dishcloth. The wings of Buzz emitted a faint buzz that hovered just beneath the buzzing of a mosquito.
Buzz is a reincarnated insect who came out of the trash can behind the bakery, where he had lived as a maggot. While in the trash can in his pupation phase, Buzz emerged from his cocoon as an insect who had been a man. And reincarnated that defied the sensibilities of humankind. Buzz had a relatively short lifespan, reflecting his weariness of existence.
Buzz had 360-degree see-around eyes, which always allowed him to see the fire from any angle in the kitchen. Buzz had wings that buzzed whenever he flew through the kitchen, creating a cacophony of sounds ranging from the hiss of the culinary flames to the crackle of the fireplace, the kitchen smoke alarm, and the distant siren.
When Buzz was young, he was a larva and did not know of the world outside of his creation. During this stage of his life, Buzz experienced famine due to a lack of food in his pantry, conflicts with other flying insects that inhabited the kitchen year-round, and danger from the ceiling fans that seemed to be on constantly.
Despite the threat of destruction to Buzz during this phase of his life, Buzz had endured. Buzz eventually found himself landing on a trombone at a FIFA game orchestra. During that same game, on a discarded hot dog of Mick Jagger’s, he regurgitated the mustard and left it on a FIFA cup. In a Singapore Chinese restaurant, Buzz tasted the eye of a dead fish, a delicacy among the Chinese, yet no one cared about Buzz’s opinion on the matter. Finally, Buzz landed upon the clothing of a reincarnated child monk visiting Vancouver and attempted to taste the sweetness on the child’s fingertips after the child had consumed a piece of candy.
Buzz’s experiences in this house took a tragic turn in a comedic fashion. A fire started in the old wiring behind the refrigerator and began to eat into the house’s furnishings. The children, unaware of the danger of the fire, were having fun and laughing at the idea of the fire’s flames dancing on the wallpaper in the living room.
A neighbor who came to borrow a half-cup of sugar found themselves in a situation of horror and fascination at the sight of the flames and smoke in the house. Buzz landed on each object of beauty and shit within the neighborhood with the same opportunism.
With which he approached each object in Buzz’s own burning house. The pesky house fly took a breather on each object to reflect on the absurdity of its existence as a creature with limited ability to move and to experience danger in the burning household.
House fly, house fly,
Go to sleep, say goodbye.
No one will weep when you die.
The lyrics to this nursery rhyme seemed appropriate for the insect who was getting no attention from the humans in the house—a somber lullaby for a fly overlooked by all.
The fire burned hotter into the kitchen. The heat distorted the air in the kitchen, transforming the space into an illusion. Buzz’s wings, typically a blur of blue-green, flashed red spots in the fire’s blaze. Buzz hovered over the children, using his proboscis to sip on the tears on their cheeks in the smoky space.
Despite the chaos around him, the insect displayed a form of dignity. Buzz was an adventurous insect who endured the world’s indifference and experienced the full range of human emotions in the span of a life. Buzz had observed the world from within a couch, under a ladybug’s wing, and atop a burning match. He had seen the world’s history from his unique perspective, if no one else ever knew of it.
When the fire brigade arrived at the scene of the accident, they worked hard to extinguish the fire. The fire brigade hoses shot torrents of water into the broken kitchen window until the fire was extinguished. And the living room walls were just scorched, but the kitchen was now steam-filled, as if it were a sauna within a surreal dreamworld. Buzz lay upon the kitchen floor, still holding onto the charred spoon. Despite Buzz’s efforts to fly out of the kitchen one last time, his wings prevented him from doing so. He fell. The observer saw Buzz fall from the kitchen shelf to the floor. The children, escorted out of the kitchen by the firefighters, passed over Buzz on the floor where he had fallen as they became engrossed in the firefighters and trucks escorting them out of the house.
No one mourned the life of the house fly that perished in the house fire. No one acknowledged the passing of the house fly whose existence was limited to alighting upon cakes, windowsills, and the passing brows of humans. Yet, an unusual elegy emerged in the mind of the individual who watched the house fire destroy all that lay before it.
He thought of the ladybugs stuck on the roses, helpless to escape the disaster befalling their home and destroying their neighbors. He thought of the children who would tell tales of the parents’ and the fire brigade’s bravery, leaving out the insignificant fly that shared in their fears that fateful night.
He thought of the lines from the poem about the house fly: “You’ve got those 360-degree see-around eyes… You’ve got wings so fast, they buzz when you fly… A maggot is what you are in your early cocoon… They probably find flies all the way on the moon… Even weeds don’t ever want to die, is it any different for a fly?” These lines, spoken with humor, express the absurdity of a house fly’s existence yet also the remarkably resilient nature of its species.
When the last ember of the fire faded and the firefighters began to gather their equipment, the narrator remained in the midst of the destruction caused by the fire. The smell of the burnt wood and the sweetness of the burnt cake filled the air. He sighed with a half-hearted attempt to clean up his jacket sleeves and contemplated the nonsense of it all.
Despite the destruction of reality that evening, he found humor in the existence of the houseflies that buzzed around the area. Even in the midst of the destruction of the home, a buzz would occasionally fill the air, reminding him of the potential of even the shortest lives to leave a mark on the world.
