It doesn’t talk.
That’s not its fault. It hasn’t really got the internal organ structures to talk. Sure, it can make sounds, but those sounds don’t come from anything that resembles a throat. A few barely audible vibrations from translucent wings as thin as Kleenex tissues, maybe even thinner.
It doesn’t think either. Well, not exactly. It can form thoughts. Not conscious, coherent ones, just bits of observation and moments of barely detectable cognition. Nothing more than neurons and electrical signals firing in its tiny brain.
It’s not something you spend time examining in your everyday life. You flick it away when it happens to hover too close to your face. Slap it with one of those plastic fly swatters when it lands on the dinner table, or if you’re feeling lazy, wave your hand at it until it flies away. To your imprecise human eyes, it instantly vanishes from sight. You’re not thinking about it anymore. Maybe you were never thinking about it. It’s nothing of consequence to you.
Don’t worry, it’s not offended by your lack of attention. In fact, it hasn’t got enough brain cells to be offended by anything. But if it had more brain cells, it would be glad of your indifference. If you noticed it for too long, its chances of survival would be drastically reduced. Your interaction with it is insignificant, but its interaction with you is life-threatening.
Right now, it’s perched sideways on a cupboard door, perfectly still, save for its two antennae. They twitch ever so slightly, fine black hairs quivering with every tiny disturbance in the air.
Below it, a man stands over a stove, pouring water into a pot. This particular pot is worn from years of use, dented here and there, its stainless steel underside burnt black from too many encounters with the same four stovetops over and over again.
The man’s son sprints into the room, shouting. His father smiles at him and tells him to keep his voice down.
Above them, the fly adjusts itself on the cupboard, picking up the boy’s heavy footfalls and loud voice, antennae quavering in mild distress at the sudden vibration. Within a few seconds, it resumes its stillness, disturbance forgotten.
The boy peers under his father’s arm at the pot. He frowns with distaste at the greens being dropped carefully into the boiling water. “I don’t want vegetables, Dad.”
“They’ll taste good, I promise,” the man says to his son. He lifts a blue-and-white-and-yellow salt canister from beside the stove and cracks its tight lid open.
“But I still don’t want them,” the boy says.
“Well, you have to have them,” his father says. “They’re good for you.”
“Green stuff tastes bad.”
“I can make it taste better.”
The fly turns around, its hair-thin legs moving delicately across the cupboard. It settles a moment later, resuming its perfect stillness.
“I don’t want vegetables!”
“That’s too bad, isn’t it? And be quiet, the neighbors will be annoyed.”
“But the neighbors are annoying too. I should be annoying back!”
“Well, even if you don’t like someone, be polite to them.”
“Too bad for them! They’re annoying! So annoying! They need to know what being annoyed feels like! I’m gonna yell SO LOU-”
The fly is currently rubbing its two front legs together. You’ve probably seen a fly do that, looking like a Disney villain rubbing his hands together while plotting something devious. The fly, however, doesn’t have nearly enough brain cells to plot anything, devious or otherwise. It rubs its legs together because it’s removing dust from its feet. It tastes with its feet, and it would rather not taste grime.
Perhaps ‘rather not’ isn’t quite the correct term. That would imply it thinks about the taste of its food, and it doesn’t. But it does seem to demonstrate an evolutionary preference for clean taste buds, although that’s about as far as its cognitive abilities go.
“Jonah-” a fork clatters onto a countertop- “If you don’t stop yelling, you don’t get dessert.”
“Hmph. Fine. Sorry.” The boy is silent for a moment. “If I eat my vegetables, can I have an ice cream after dinner?”
The man picks up the fork and begins to fish the vegetables out of the pot with it, laying them in a ceramic dish. “No ice cream, but you can have a piece of candy.”
The boy pouts. “Why?”
“It’s cold out today,” the man says. “So no cold food.”
“It’s not thaaaaat cold.”
“Nope.”
“Come onnnn,” the boy whines.
“No, Jonah.”
“It’s just one ice cream. Just one.”
“My answer isn’t changing,” the man says, transferring the last vegetable from the pot to the dish.
“Daaaaaad-”
Apparently, the fly is satisfied with the cleanliness of its taste buds, because it’s still again. That’s something to wonder about. How does it decide when its feet are clean enough? Does it have an absolute threshold, or does it simply approximate, like how you would guess at how long it takes to microwave a bowl of leftover pasta? Is it just second nature, the way you don’t even have to think about the amount of instant coffee powder to put in your mug? You just know it’s three and a half spoons on a good day and four on a not-so-good one.
“Fine, you can have an ice cream, but you have to drink some hot water right after, okay?”
“Yay! Okay!”
The man rolls his eyes and reaches for the cupboard door, pulling it open to look for something.
The movement startles the fly, which removes itself hastily from the cupboard door and zips away, vanishing from sight once again.
The family of two doesn’t know. No one knows it was ever there except you and me.
The Roar 