Flypaper

It was the end of a long day and an even longer series of regrettable life decisions. But after it was done, all the terror gone and nothing but purpose ahead, there was a sense of renewal, of things actually going right for me for a change.

I was sick of coming home to an apartment she treated like a landfill. The toilet had unscrubbable stains of feces sprayed on the upper porcelain rim from too much French fries and vodka, coffee and cigarettes – vasoconstriction causing the smooth muscle to spasm the partially digested chyme rushed through the lower intestine. Cunnilingus made me nauseas at the thought. Sex was an activity we didn’t bother with anymore at that point, along with sweeping the floor or washing the dishes. I think about it now and it had started so many months before, almost all the way back to the first day we met. But it wasn’t that far that I can say when I noticed what a terrible person she truly was on the inside.

It should have been obvious to me. Her grooming habits left something to be desired. I can’t really talk though. My hygiene of late hasn’t been very prim. I’d like to blame that bit on picking up those habits of hers that I couldn’t stand but put up with so long as she put out. Things like how she never trimmed her toenails, only painted them, the paint was always flaking. How she had a fear of rats but never did the dishes, just left out plates of half-eaten sandwiches or three-quarters of a pot of pasta on the stove for days. Or how I had to avoid knocking over all the plastic cups with paintbrushes left on tabletops, bookcase shelves, the back of the toilet, the top of the radiator, next to the alarm clock. It was living with a five-year-old who’d discovered finger paints. Everything had a smudge of color in acrylic on it.

Maybe it wasn’t even her. Maybe it was the dog that belonged to someone in the building being let out to shit in the hall. It left me to wonder each time I opened the door if I was stepping out of one world of shit into another. Maybe it was the broken lock on the front of the building that I needing to bang loud enough on the door to wake the super. Maybe it wasn’t even the apartment but the job. Each early morning that I came home early from a graveyard shift, no one would be awake. It would be too late to catch anyone heading in to go to bed or coming home from a bar. It might have even been the pipes bursting in the middle of the night when I was in desperate need of a shower. The fire department hammering the lock off of the cellar doors – the echo like a gavel handing down the sentence of insomnia – in order to turn off the water at the main.

Or maybe just the coppery note of blood spurting from the femoral artery of a gunshot wound filling my nose.

The super wasn’t in his apartment. He was at a funeral. I had just gotten in from the C shift. Light came up early that time of the year, and the noise from the firemen woke her up.

            “What have you done about the flies, Love?” Desdemona asked in that lilted British accent. It didn’t seem to matter if it was a question or a statement, it always sounded like a rhetorical one, somehow passing judgment on the listener to which it was directed. “I’ve been bitten every bloody time I sit still for more than five seconds.”

            She sat at the kitchen table we found in a side alley sipping coffee she’d left out for at least a day. She lit a cigarette.

            “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. I put up the flypaper strips over the windows, the sink, the stove, the trash…”

She rolled her eyes as she ashed the spent embers into one of the paintbrush cups sitting on the table. Her skin glistened in the late August heat. The city was hazy outside, each exhale of burning dried tobacco filled the apartment’s stagnant air with an acrid scent. I took one from the pack she had set on the table. She looked at me annoyed.

“I’m almost out, do you have to smoke mine?” she asked. “Don’t you have any of your own?”

I put it back like a scolded child and went to the bedroom to try and sleep, knowing full well that if the heat didn’t keep me awake, the buzzing of the flies or the drumming bass from the Latin music at full volume in an adjacent apartment would. Maybe it was pity sex, or her libido was revved up from the thought of firemen, but she came in soon after I lay down to sleep. After she fucked me, she went back to the kitchen and smoked another cigarette.

            That’s how it went for the first month. Stifling heat day and night causing us to soak the sheets in sweat. We shared a bed most nights, but sometimes it was too much and I had to go up to the roof with a blanket and bug spray. Sometimes it rained. We couldn’t afford the cost of the electricity that air conditioning would have eaten up. But she insisted on having a fan in the window in the tiny room we shared to keep her cool. Laying there, she blocked the flow of the breeze from my dampened skin. Her body heat filled the air next to me. A twin size bed was all that would fit in the bedroom.

“Flies don’t eat live flesh. They don’t bite. Horseflies, yes. But houseflies? No. They only go after the rotting flesh,” my friend Nando told me after relating the story to him. We sat outside a café by the hospital where I worked. A cute place with a cuter cashier.

“You know,” he said. “You should already know this being a nurse and all, the whole thing about maggots…”

            “What about maggots?” I asked.

            “I don’t know if they still do it, but they used to.”

“Used to what? Jesus, just get to the point. You always blather on without getting to the damn point.”

            Nando had a tendency to do this. Ever since we met in college, he liked to spout facts useful only to medics and quiz show contestants.

“Sorry…” he continued. “The maggots, back in the middle ages, or Civil War, or whenever, they used to use them on – Civil War, definitely…”

“Jesus, you’re like Dustin fucking Hoffman,” I said. I was irritable to say the least. The lack of sleep and ineffectuality of coffee had me on edge a lot. It could have also been the fact that I was jealous of Nando for already being in his residency while I had to drop out and taking a nursing job to pay for Desdamona’s aspirations.

“Sorry, sorry. It was Civil War, soldiers whose limbs were going gangrene, the doctors would put maggots on the wounds to eat away the dead flesh and keep the infection from spreading.”

            “They could have just washed their hands in the first place,” I thought. I kept my comment to myself. I looked through the window from the patio where we sat. I saw the cashier singing to herself, the café was empty. She caught me watching, stopped singing and smiled, embarrassed. I smiled back to let her know it was alright, giving her a wink, then realized how creepy that would seem and turned back to my conversation with Nando. He kept talking but I only thought about how carefree the cashier was singing to herself, stopping only when she knew someone was watching.

The hospital had handed down new shift assignments the second month. I had expected to start medical school after the summer ended, but the loan package fell through, so the income from the work I did was all that kept us in that apartment. The shifts I was assigned were graveyard shifts, keeping me up all night with not much time to sleep during the day, if I even could. Latino music echoed off the exposed brick along with all the horns and cat calls that went on during the daylight hours. The bedroom window faced the south and arched around the room throughout the day keeping it hotter than the rest of the apartment. I would have slept in the kitchen, shaded by the other buildings, but every time I tried Desdemona sighed, disapproving of my need to dream.

So it was, in those hot months, that I stole packs of cigarettes from her to smoke outside while filling myself up with enough caffeine to keep me operating. She slept most days, spending all night on my computer or in front of the television. Occasionally she would pick up a paintbrush and put it to canvas.

....To Be Continued?