Fly Eater

Gerald’s mouth looked salty whenever he was out of bed. Whenever he was in bed, which was much more usual, the smell in his room was like cauliflower molding through cheese, stinking until the walls molted into paste. I sat with him on a chair, opposite the bed, so he would feel human. In that room most of the day, I tried to find work online, knowing I was kidding myself. Gerald was a full-time job. 

One morning he told me how much he missed eating flies. They were his Thursday treat, he said. To him they were like Baklava or rum punch, a delectable dessert. Then I watched him from the corner chair as he sneezed convulsively.

“It’s your perfume,” he shouted. “I’m allergic. You know that. Are you trying to kill me or something?”

If I had been wearing any scent besides my own sweat, Gerald’s rants would have alarmed me. Instead, they irritated me and I realized as he sunk back into my bed that I had forgotten how to feel alarmed. I watched him then as I had observed the medicinal way he had taken over my life with precise planning, aware that I had been fooled like a tarot card reader’s audience made to ooh and ah at street tricks. Gerald had mastered all the surefire, winning traits every con artist should know. After three years, I knew he didn’t care about me and no longer even believed that illness stuck to his lungs as he claimed. Instead, I saw that Gerald’s mind had taken over all of him.

He snorted through sleep as I watched his drool collect into swimming pools on the corner of my pillow. The room, the house, the man had consumed me. A year ago, when he was in perfect health, I felt lucky to kiss the ground Gerald walked on. Learning is painful. Outside the window, it was still frost bitten, but the sun was making its bold entrance downstage center. Away from the house, the whole world was paradise in warm rays, but there Gerald coughed and spattered, rising every now and then to shuffle through the house, hunched over in his red and blue striped nightgown, cursing at the walls and slamming his fist on the door’s molding. If I had just met him, I would have thought he was eighty years old.

The room stank of cigarettes, pot and disease. I brought Gerald food and listened to his complaints. That was my life and I was fed up. If I had served him flies like he requested in hallucinatory ravings, maybe he would contract true illness. Maybe then I could have escaped him sooner. As the walls caved inward and I exploded within its shrinkage, I shut my eyes and dreamed of easy sleep and freedom.