Flyland—The History of Flies

Flyland
October 2003

It was a hot summer day. The animals lay along the north wall of the huge loft where there was some shade and a humid breeze. They all felt very lazy.

Mishmish, always the dainty cat, was curled into a black ball, her delicate head tucked under her front paws. She was deep in sleep and shuddered from time to time as she dreamt of milk and mice.

Mugs, too, was hot. He lay on his side. His huge Doberman body spread out, legs straight, the way dogs lie. His massive head, black with a touch of brown, was thrown back. As dogs go, he was a very handsome fellow. He panted his sleep, tongue hanging out and a bit of drool dripping off.

Little Arthur, the tabby kitten, slept as usual under the couch where he felt safe, even though it was hotter there than on the open floor.

Herbert, a spry little mouse with a shiny black coat, and an elegant tail, slept in the tube core of a roll of toilet paper that Mugs had retrieved from the bathroom waste basket. At the other end, lay the demure Nan, a sweet grey mouse, with pink ears, and a charming squinty nose.

Upon one of the columns, close by the sleeping menagerie, hung a very large house spider named Vergil. He was a very impressive spider, deep brown and black in color. His legs were finely pointed, and he had the largest pincers you’d ever seen. When he slept one eye always stayed open, on the prowl for a nice fat fly. Above him, sleeping soundly were thirty grandchildren spiderettes, trentuplets as they’d hatched within seconds of each other from momma’s eggs.

Flies gave a quiet buzz from time to time. They didn’t move. Even for them the heat was too oppressive to buzz much or move about. They looked like black specks on the walls and ceiling.

Everyone felt a bit sticky and wet from the humidity.

Mishmish, who was extraordinarily acute in the area of sound, pricked up her ears. She heard and felt the slightest, most delicate breeze, no louder or stronger than a sixty-fourth note pianissimo. A very large fly was the source of the sound. He had floated down to the floor. He was the most extraordinary fly she had ever seen. She raised herself up into a long cat stretch shaking out her back legs, gave a big yawn, and sat up. She lay down again and lowered her head to get a better view of the fly.

He wore a fedora hat and a tartan waistcoat. He was smoking a fly sized cigar which smelt quite terrible. He had a swaggering, brusque manner. He came and sat near her nose upon a small stick lying on the floor, crossed his middle legs using his long jumping legs to balance himself, and held his cigar with one of his upper legs.

“Hey there cat,” said the fly. “I’ve heard about you. Aren’t you called Mis or something?”

“My name is Mishmish”, she said. “Wow! What a fly! Who are you?”

“My name is Flig. I’m a leader of the flies hereabout. We flies kind of hang together. We have our own ways of living by. Most other creatures think that we are just nuisances that eat muck.”

“Well,” said Mishmish, “we’re not wrong for thinking that. You’re always dive-bombing my litter box and it’s quite smelly and pasty sometimes, as my human can be very lazy and forgetful. Isn’t that muck? What can you expect when we see you feeding on offal and rotting stuff in the garbage can? But you, I say, look quite different than most any other fly, and very clean too. I’ve never seen a fly in a tartan waistcoat and a fedora hat before.”

“Well, yes,” said Flig, “I’m sort of an ambassador fly. I go around trying to set the record straight . We didn’t always chew on turds and rotting lettuce leaves.”

“Why do you come now to tell us how clean flies once were,” she asked.

“Well, I’ve heard that here live most intelligent animals who discuss weighty subjects and who love stories and philosophy,” he replied. “Maybe you can help the bad opinion everyone has of flies.”

“Well this is true,” answered Mishmish. “We love discussing history and humans and all kinds of moral issues. But, we love stories most of all, and are beholden to any other creature or non-creature that has a tale to tell.”

“Well, well, well,” said Flig, “then I have just such a story that will edify and enrapture you.”

“I am now awake and am all ears,” she said.

“Once upon a time, we had our own civilization. We had a very different life then. We weren’t just nuisances buzzing around your faces and your food, or worse.”

“What was that you said?” she exclaimed loudly. “Once upon a time! Oh how I love those words, tell me, tell me. Oh please, tell me the story.”

Mishmish’s shout of joy woke up all the other sleeping animals. Some of them were quite grumpy. “Mishmish,” they groaned, “Mishmish, why do you have to wake us up? It’s still so hot!”

But their curiosity was fired up as soon as they noticed the very odd, large fly. Whoever could resist hearing a ‘once upon a time’ story from such a creature? It was sure to be interesting. The mice straggled sleepily out of their toilet roll tube. Little Arthur peered out from his safe hiding place, his black nose twitched excitedly at the commotion and the promise of a story. He loved stories most of all, even more than fish. “Wow,” he piped up. “A gangster fly!”

“No,” Flig said,”I am no gangster fly, but I am a robber fly. That’s why I am so big. I come from a special tribe of flies. We call us the Asilinis.”

After everyone had settled down a bit, as the heat made the animals quite uncomfortable so they fluttered and twitched as they got settled, Mishmish introduced Mugs, Arthur, Herbert and Nan.

“Pleased to meet you Flig Fly,” said Little Arthur.

“Yes, likewise,” said Mugs and Nan.

“I love your waistcoat,” said Herbert. “How finely sewn it is, and the back a very nice silk. I can hardly wait to hear what you’ve got to say.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Little Arthur, tripping over his words with excitement. “I also can hardly not wait neither. I love, love, love stories.”

“Well,” Flig said, “pleased to oblige, because that is my purpose in life, to edify and enlighten about my fellow flies, how we really are and how we really were. I must explain that we are very intelligent insects.

“It’s true we flies don’t live very long here in this world. So how could we know anything? We aren’t even around long enough to go through kindergarten, let alone college. But you see, well, we flies share in a kind of communal brain of all our race, back to the misty past. It’s kind of like, you know, we don’t have our own big brain, but we move about directly wired to a huge external brain so we don’t need the individual stuff. So when we need to know something we just pick it up through the air from other flies or from the hookup to the Great Fly Brain. No one knows where that is anymore. But once upon a time, things were very different for us flies.”

Flig clapped his middle feet together and made an odd noise with his wings and a kind of high pitched pipey sound came out of his proboscis and pincer mouth. “Now one, two, three, hit it boys.”

At these words, a row of large black flies appeared as if by magic. They did a little dance, hopping right and then left by opening and closing their wings. At the same time they all sang.

With a big, big brain are we blessed.
See us flies, we are the best.
With a thousand facets in our eyes,
we are never duped by human lies.
No sharp tongued walking killers
Can wipe us out for thrillers.
We dive-bomb these boobs
and nasty pimply dudes.
We suck their blood and eat their meat
and in their potato salad meet.
No dummies us, no fools,
nor idiotic ghouls.
We’re cleverer than the rest.
See, see, see, we flies are the best.

All the animals cheered at the song. “Hippy, hah, ho,” laughed Little Arthur.

Herbert laughed so much that he rolled about the floor and rubbed his fat little belly and giggled. “Too much, too much,” he said.

Flig continued after the laughing had quieted down. “I’m going to tell you about things that are very secret and that no fly ever talks about. But I like you guys, and I figure that it’s ok for you to know the real truth.

“Flyland. Flyland. Beautiful Flyland. Here we lived once in paradise, in fly splendor. And even though things are very different now, we have a lot to be proud of. For example, humans would not be flying around in machines if it weren’t for us flies. Why, not only did we give them the idea of flying, we also gave them the name for it: fly. They’d never have figured it out for themselves. Even the birds learnt the same thing from us. Remember, like the roaches and the fleas, we go back a quarter of a billion years. But in success and number of us and number of species, we are more dominant than our primordial brother insects, cockroaches and fleas.”

A cell of militant fleas had snuck in very quietly. The fleas always had spies about that blended in so well no one even knew they were present. These might be very young fleas who would hide in the fur of mice, or very old, toothless fleas. Now these particular fleas, very bold and arrogant, came forward. They were a mean looking bunch.

They all wore little white gutras or turbans with the doubled black igal cord that held the turbans tightly about their dangerous looking heads. They carried tiny Uzis, and their little bodies were crisscrossed with bandoliers. They came into the circle of animals without a sound.

When Flig saw them, he blanched. Immediately the five singing flies encircled his back and sides like bodyguards. The flies were a tough lot that wouldn’t be messed with. So there was a detente between flea and fly.

“Hah, a pack of lies,” exclaimed one of the fleas. His gutra was checkered and folded so that it hung about his back. He was the biggest flea you’d ever seen. It was assumed by all that he was the leader, because of the way he carried himself and stood out at the front of the others.

“You flies are nothing compared to us fleas,” he said. His voice was quiet but menacing. “We preceded you on planet earth. While you were just some slimy cells in a pool of water somewhere, we were kings of the world. Heck, we roamed all over the joint. If anyone has a claim to success and ownership, it’s us. We’ve been jumping all over this ball of soil for aeons, far and wide. You flies have usurped too much from us.”

“The terrorist fleaty gang,” said Flig. “A bunch of balupas. We flies know who you are. The word’s out. So watch it.”

Everyone felt the tension. It seemed as though the two bands were going to go at each other.

“And who are you?” asked Mugs. He gave a soft growl, which coming from him, was not to be ignored. He was getting a bit angry at the sight of these evil eyed terrorists. In his past life he had been a G.I., so he knew all about terrorists. “And stay off my clean black coat and brown shod paws or I’ll kill you all with one big huff.”

“My name is El Rashid Ishmael bin Julababad,” said the big flea. “I’m a flea with a mission. To free all my fellow fleas from laboratory extinction.”

“But, but, but,” sputtered Little Arthur. He still did not speak or meow mellifluously like Mishmish his mentor. “Whatever are, are are youse doing? Helping other fleas held in nasty human places?”

“I fight for our race everywhere. We deserve the right to blood and the right to transport microbes, a thing that the flies, who are usurpers, took from us.

“They call us terrorist fleas, the flies. And humans think that when we bite them, usually on their smelly toes, that we’re even worse than terrorists. What do humans know of terrorism? Not much. But it is them, not us, that are the terrorists. And what an incompetent lot they are. They mostly kill themselves as well as their prey. Just a few here and there. But we can lay claim to huge wipe outs. Heck, we killed half of Europe and didn’t even have to go around the block. We got the rats to do the dirty. All we had to do is bite them and they went so mad that they left their homes and ran through the streets spreading the little airborne spores. Now, that was a feat to be respected. We fleas just sat back and leisurely sucked on all the blood we could ever have wanted.”

Vergil, the huge house spider, had descended from his high vantage point. When the fleas saw him, it put the fear of Allah into them. They hoped that he wasn’t going to web them up for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The fleas all nervously put their sharp clawy feet on the butt of their little Uzis. The flies also shuddered at the thought of being caught in a spider web and being dined on while still alive. It was no fun, having a spider eat a nice leg attached to your thorax while you watched.

Vergil sensed the insects’ discomfort. “Be calm, be calm. I have eaten my fill. I am more interested in talking with you than in eating you,” he said.

“You fleas say you were the first ones here on earth. But that is still unproved. Indeed, all the ancestors of insects precede the Triassic period. We all go back beyond the beyond, close to the time earth was habitable. All of us survived every calamity that wiped out the other creatures, large and small. The ice age, the great cataclysm, all sorts of nature’s fury and wrath.But let us first listen to Flig’s story, for I am sure it’s very interesting,” said Vergil.

“Yes,” chorused Nan and Herbert.

“Oh, please go on,” said Mishmish. Little Arthur gave her a grateful glance.

“And you fleas, quiet you down,” said Mugs very sternly. “No more of these self-serving, prideful interruptions. I want to hear all about Flyland.”

The fleas grumbled and muttered quietly. They sat down and put their Uzis on the floor in front of them, a great relief to the cats and mice.

“Well,” said Flig, the Asilini fly, “I’ve quite forgotten where I was before this swaggering interruption. Ah, yes ... I know that humans hate us and think we’re just disease carriers, but we contribute a lot to the whole ecosystem of earth. We help pollinate, and we also move bacteria around from place to place, so they don’t all congregate where they’d be even more dangerous. What would humans do with fly swatters if it wasn’t for us? We contribute a lot to their relationships, too. If we didn’t come buzzing around, a lot of them wouldn’t know what to talk about.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Mishmish. “But can you get back to the story?”

“Well, let’s see wherre was I,” stuttered Flig. He took a puff from his cigar and coughed a bit. “Ahem. By buzzing around nasty offal, we show humans where some of their own kind are messing up the place by dumping anywhere they want. If you see a huge clump of flies droning loudly over something, you can be sure that it’s a dead rat or something rotting away in the sun. No one would want their kid to be playing near a spot like that. So see, we are actually very helpful to humans.

“The story,” cried Herbert, “let’s hear the story.” He was getting quite frustrated at all this fly preaching.

“We now, yes ... But I have another point to make,” said Flig. “We also get the dung beetles worked up and working faster by giving them a lot of our over production of maggots. They love these tasty morsels so much they convert cow and horse dung faster into loam to reach these fat treats. This saves humans millions every year since they do not have to clean up any dung at all. And we also clean up their corpses after the undertaker leaves.”

“Humans just never know appreciation. That’s why they’re such an unhappy lot,” said El Rashid.

“Yes, that’s true,” said Mishmish. “I don’t know why they’re such dunderheads.”

“It’s because they cannot see outside of themselves,” said Vergil. “They are trapped and imprisoned by thoughts and concepts. But, please continue Flig.”

“And you know what else, our maggots have been used to clean wounds so they don’t turn gangrenous ...”

“Humans love you so much they’re always trying to annihilate you with poisons. Get on with the story,” growled Mugs.

“Well, now, um, let’s see,” said Flig. “The only reason we even tolerate humans is for all of their trash. There are always lots of dribblers and droppers — this is what we call humans, ‘dribblers’ and ‘droppers’. It’s like those big cafeteria soda machines where you push a button and the soda comes out, sometimes it keeps dribbling a bit. So, a lot of humans dribble from the sides of their mouth while they are sipping their sweet drinks. Guess the sugar relaxes their muscles. Or they spray out a lot of it when they’re talking to each other and sipping between words. To us flies, it’s like a huge rain shower of sweet droplets that land all over the other person’s clothes and some fall to the ground. Then, they wonder why we flies are all buzzing around. Hey, for us it’s a party.

“And then you know, when the baker pulls all that crusty bread and cookies from his oven, there are always delicious hot crumbs. Even in pizza parlors, we get our fair share of the crumbs, and sometimes splats of Romano and Parmesan cheese, and a bit of leftover pepperoni or even a mushroom. I myself don’t go in for these new-fangaled pizzas with funny stuff like pineapples. Give me the good ole USA kind.

“The ‘droppers’ are all kinds of people, I’d say pretty much everyone, except for the most tight-mouthed who play it close to the lips with napkins. But there are some things that just crumb up, like those elephant ear cookies. They just crumble when you look at them. And then there are the fat ladies who can’t but help drop crumbs on their breasts. Wow, what a treat it is for us to be able to dive bomb onto a luscious soft, warm plateau to taste a sweet crumb. But no mind, absolutely everywhere there are ‘droppers’.

“And little human kids make the most mess of all. The younger, the messier. The parents, of course, get very upset when they see us buzzing around their young offspring trying to lick off all that juicy stuff on their fingers, hands, mouths and faces.

“We flies, we don’t ask for much. Hell, we eat up all the crumbs that the ‘dribblers’ and ‘droppers’ leave all over the place. Yet they still hate us, the humans, and want to eradicate us. But they haven’t succeeded yet. Face it, one way to look at human life is that you get born, you make a lot of trash, and then you die. If they could face facts, they’d admit we are the most successful of all the species on earth. Earth cannot survive without us, but it sure can do without man.”

“Hey, hey, there you go again,” shouted out Vergil and all his grandchildren spiders, “what do you mean you are the most successful species? What about us spiders and all the other insects?”

“Yes, and don’t forget about us fleas,” chimed in El Rashid.

“Sorry,” said Flig, “I meant insects in general.

“Can we get back to the story?” asked Mishmish. “Enough of all this pontifcating now. Let’s hear the rest of the once-upon-a-time. Come, flig, the story.”

“Sorry, I get carried away. Let’s see, where was I. But wait, well, uh, we flies lived in paradise. But let me just male one more important point. Humans are always belly aching about overcrowding and too many cars and how big and packed Mexico City is. Pfaw! In a square kilometer, there are 10,000 million of our insect brethren. In a square mile, 26,000 million. Why one acre of land is home to 12 million spiders alone. The human population of earth is about 6 billion. Guess how many of your fellow insects live here with them. Come on, just guess.”

“Er, a billion, ten billions, er trills ....,” piped up little Arthur.

“No doubt a shit load,” said Mugs.

“Come on, come on,” shouted the mice getting very excited.

“Ok, here goes. There are 120 quadrillions of us all over the earth.”

“But what’s a quadrillion?” asked Arthur.

“Ok I’ll spell it out,” said Flig. “There are twelve zero zerozerozero, zerozerozero, zerozerozero, zerozerozero, zerozerozero!”

“Wow! Boy, talk about overcrowding,” said Mugs.

“Yep,” said Flig, “we are not to be taken lightly.” And he gave a wicked little snort.

“Back to the story, please Flig,” asked Vergil in his smoothest voice.

Flig shuddered. “Now in Flyland,” Flig continued, “there were all kinds of flies. There were the sacred flies, gold in color and very large; they were priestly flies. Then there were the big green bottlenose flies, and the large blues, iridescent like sapphires. The big black flies -- and I mean very big. And all the regular sized flies. The houseflies, the fruit flies, the garden flies, and the horse flies, the stable flies, the rabbit flies, the mice flies. So many flies, in fact, that one could write a whole book about the varieties.

“In those ancient times, we flies didn’t fly because we didn’t need to. Actually none of us even knew how to fly really. We ambled about having deep conversations. We ate flower petals and the like, or fruit. We didn’t even buzz because we had no need for that either. See, in Flyland we had no predators. There weren’t spiders trying to web us up for dinner. There weren’t humans with poisons and stuff.

“Now, we were very good climbers and we knew how to hang glide or float, but we never knew that we could flap our wings and fly off. All that came later. I think that it was like there was a switch in the fly brain that had never been thrown to tell us that we could fly and buzz about. We knew how to jump off places and float down. The kids loved that the most. They liked climbing up to the top of a rock and floating down when there was a nice breeze, because they could float quite a long way.

“Hmph,” broke in El Rashid. “We fleas didn’t have that problem. We weren’t that ignorant when it came to how we were equipped. We always knew how to jump very high. How come flies couldn’t fly?” He snorted with glee.

“Don’t ask me, but we just never knew we could.” Flig controlled his anger. “We didn’t need to escape from predators, so why should we ever exert ourselves flying? There was no necessity to fly far for food. No necessity to congregate and buzz together around good rotting stuff where we lay our eggs. Everything was different then.

“We had cities, even. These cities weren’t really planned. They just grew naturally from our desire for the common good. I think that it’s ok to say that in those days, it wasn’t every fly for himself. The common good was what we all lived by. It is told that the wasps were hired to construct huge spherical cities for us flies, with lots of little apartments. Our early fly ancestors even had the bees build smaller spheres for the baby flies. Our eggs were laid in nurseries of sweet honeycomb because our baby flies love the taste. Around the city were lovely gardens where we would sit in the sun and feed on savory flower petals and leaves.”

“It sounds like such a pretty place,” sighed Little Arthur.

“Yes, it was. See, we flies were living in our paradise. We didn’t even know that we were called flies as there was no one to tell us we were flies. We just were.

“We thought our communication. We knew how to ‘talk to’ those that weren’t flies that lived about us. It was a very simple pointing language. Our own language which is only dimly recalled and predated buzzese, the way we talk to each other now, was called flugenese or something. After we left Flyland we just buzzed at each other.

“But something was amiss in Flyland. Things were changing, and no one really knew why. We were getting bored. Or, maybe we were getting disconnected from the common good and getting further and further away from the shared brain. No one has really been able to explain why this even happened, but a dim kind of consciousness was being born. So all that came to pass later cannot be blamed on what Fladam, the most notorious fly in our history, did later. The seed of our destruction was already planted.”

“Ahem, if I might say something,” said Vergil the house spider. “It is the paradox of paradise that was taking place. You see within the ember of paradise there is also the destruction of paradise. The only way to have true paradise that lasts is to come back to it after labor and suffering. It is all intended as such. It had to happen to you flies. Only after getting back to the original core of being can you once again have a paradise that will last. I know it seems silly to say, but just as you flies didn’t know you were flies, so paradise is unknown without ‘un-paradise’.”

“Yep,” replied Flig, “I see your point. The fall took a long time. It didn’t just happen in an instant. We flies got away slowly from our original purpose, which was simply to be in the best state that we could be. It was kind of like everything just started cracking.

“Now in Flyland, we no longer had perfect equality. It used to be that a fly was a fly was a fly. Now there were kinds of classes of flies. See, there were flies of different sizes and different colors. The big gold flies now rode enormous centipedes. In the last few years before the end, the gold flies had gotten rather ostentatious. They really didn’t care how much they had to feed their ‘centis’ (as we call centipedes). And they were always trading in old centis for newer younger ones with brighter colors. Why, some of the gold fly families might keep four or more centis. They even used smaller blue flies to drive the centis for them, as they felt that it was beneath them to sit upfront and coax the centis where they wanted to go.

“Oh, I’d love to ride on a huge big worm,” said Herbert, giggling. “It must feel all soft and wiggedly woggledy. What a trip that would be.”

“Hm,” said Vergil in a whisper with an edge to it. “Worms are ok, but not to ride. Just to eat.”

All the insects shuddered. Flig stopped dead.

“Don’t worry, Flig,” said Mishmish. Vergil enjoys shaking things up. I’m sure he’s more interested in your tale than your taste.”

“C’mon, Flig,” said Mugs, “please go on. Nothing will happen to you.”

“Uhum. Now where was I .... Well a lot of the so-called upper class flies also started to keep pets. Aphids were all the rage. Trouble was you had to keep them leashed in because they got stolen a lot and wound up in fresh ‘suckie’ bars where they were chopped up raw and served on small tasty bay leaves. The blue flies, who were always into the avant garde, loved this new kind of food. I think they learned about it from other insects. They were always pretending they weren’t really flies, but put on airs as though they were butterflies. Honestly, it really galled the other flies. They used to call them ‘bluppiess’. They had their own lifestyle. They were the most arrogant of all the flies.

“Various classes of flies kept various pets. A lot of them got the mite craze after a famous fly actress was seen kissing her mite. There was such a mite fad that all the plants got very happy when the fly pet shops rustled them off the Ficus trees and other plants to have enough stock. Mealy bugs were big, too, for awhile. Flies loved their fuzzy soft whiteness. But they didn’t live long and had to be constantly placed on living leaves so they could suck out the juice. High maintenance pets didn’t suit flies, especially not the bluppies.”

“Wow,” said Mishmish, “I’m amazed that you flies had a kind of civilization. Did you have rules and laws and the like?”

“Oh, yes,” replied Flig. “There is still a dim recollection of this in the shared fly brain. But, that was a very long time ago. A time mostly forgotten and lost in the thick mists of history.”

The mice and the cats were amazed at all they heard. Flies living in cities! Who would have thought? “Go on, go on, please Flig,” they shouted. “Tell us more, tell us more.”

“Well, as story goes,” continued Flig, “one day a group of bluppie flies got antsy and started talking and challenging each other. Like I said, they got bored very easily now and always wanted some novel kind of stimulation. I don’t know why but they were more dissatisfied than the rest of the flies. They must have had something wrong with them. They were never at peace.

“Anyhow, they wanted to go out beyond the bounds of Flyland. You see, no one was allowed to leave Flyland. What grew there stayed there. That was the law. There were also dire warnings about what lay outside and there were curses to keep the flies from leaving the borders. It was said that whoever left Flyland would be doomed to forever be in movement and would not eat sweet flowers, but rotting leaves and muck. Everyone was taught this. The first law was that no fly could leave Flyland.

“Flyland was big enough for all the flies. None of them ever thought of leaving Flyland. Why should they? They had everything they could ever want. Whatever did they think they’d find outside of Flyland except maybe death or something even scarier?

“But, there was no stopping bluppies once they got an idea. I suppose they shouldn’t receive all the blame. As I said, the seed of our destruction was already planted. The bluppies were high spirited and loved hang gliding. Some old fly had told them about the myths of the other side. He had said that there were mountains and rivers and that there were huge thermal updrafts where a fly could coast along for hours. Well, this was something hard to resist for the athletic young blues.

“So one day, very early in the morning, they stole to the border of Flyland and crossed over. Nothing much seemed all that different to them. They came to a brook of nice clean cold water, where they played about and took baths.

“One of the blues was named Fladam. He’s written right into our shared fly brain history as the one who messed everything up for us flies. He was kind of the leader of the bluppies who all followed him and adored him. He was full of bravura and swagger.

“The other flies said to him, “Fladam, we’re hungry. Let’s go eat some of those corn flower petals before returning to Flyland.”

“What,” replied Fladam, “eat the same old stuff when we’re here in this new and wonderful place? And return already when we’ve not even seen anything much about this world so new to us. No way. I’m staying.”

A few of the less brave blues did return, but the rest kept walking along, following Fladam. They came into a clearing. The sun now was very hot and they thought to rest awhile. Each found a nice stalk to lean against and take a snooze. Now, the stalk that Fladam had chosen to lean against was quite broad and belonged to a very green leafy plant that had long fronds of seeds. It was its time of year to drip a sweet smelling resinous fluid.

“Fladam lay against the stalk and fell asleep. He snored and was having a wonderful dream. Unbeknown to him, the resin dripped down the stalk and came and settled about his mouth, and dripped onto his belly, for he leaned against the stalk. Poor Fladam, he knew not what he was about to do. Well, as story goes, the resin was very hot from being in the sun, and it woke Fladam right up, and he tasted it in his mouth. It had a pungent odor, the like he had never before smelt. And it had a strange numbing taste. But he liked it and soon had licked it all off his proboscis. He felt a little light headed, and thought that maybe it was because he was still hungry, so he climbed up the stalk to get to the source of the resin and he started slurping it up. Little did he know that that action would forever change the course of fly life.”

“Why?” asked Arthur, the little kitten. “Why?”

“Well,” replied Flig, “there are many strange things both now and in days of old that can change how a creature sees the world. Something he might drink or eat might alter his mind a bit. And this is what we flies feel happened to Fladam.

“After a while, as it’s told, he felt very strange, the world looked very different to him. He saw his comrades still sleeping down at the bases of the plants in the shade. He started to fly about the plants and dive bomb down. He buzzed his comrades. He shouted out to them. ‘Bzzz! Hey, friends, bzzz, hey up here friends! Bzzz! Fly, fly up here. Bzzz! Fly up here! Bzzz come and taste this stuff!’

“Well his friends just looked at him with gaping probosci, like he was crazed or something. His friends looked up at him. ‘Huh? Fly, what’s fly?’

‘It’s this, it’s this,’ and Fladam flew around to show them. ‘Come up here. C’mon, don’t be such cowards. Get up here and taste this stuff.’

“Well, even though they thought he was acting very strangely, they followed him by climbing up the stalk and they all drank the nectar. They all started buzzing at each other and started flying about. And their eyes could see now in many different directions at the same time. They were having a really good time. Now they knew “fly”. And it wasn’t very long before they knew the names for many things, even for what they were. Nothing would ever be the same again for these flies.

“They returned to Flyland and hauled as much of the resin back with them as they could. And they got a lot of the others to drink it as well. Once they had tasted the resin, others left Flyland and went looking for the source of the knowledge plant that the resin dripped from. Some returned to give resin to others. It wasn’t long before Flyland was deserted. All the flies had flown off after they had tasted the nectar. They had broken the law about never leaving Flyland. So Flyland was no more. And all of us flies were forever in flight and moving about all over the earth, living out our lives eating muck and stuff, living a hard life, hated and killed by humans, the food for spiders and other insects and animals.

“This is all lost in the mists of time. The memory only resides in the Great Fly Brain. But there still remains a song about this glorious past in our history, with a hope that we might return once more to the wonderful bright garden that was Flyland.”

“O, please sing, please do,” the mice said together, for they loved songs.

“Yes, for me too, please sing it,” piped up Little Arthur, the kitten.

And the baby spiders all clamored, “Yes, please, o please sing it to us all.”

“OK, we’ll try,” said the huge big flies that had sung the earlier ditty.

“OK, ready flies?” asked Flig. “One, two, three.”

Flyland, Flyland, Glorious home
Garden birthplace full of loam.
Most beautiful motherland lost in time
We shed tears throughout this rhyme.
Momma’s there and Poppa too,
Thinking this always makes us blue.
In our dreams the gardens bloom,
Our cities safe and far from doom.
One day we will return to you,
In all corners of the earth we now boo-hoo.

The flies all had to use a lot of kleenex after this to wipe their faceted eyes. But to tell the truth, even the restrained Mishmish, had tears in her eyes. And all the children were crying openly, the song was so sad.

“What a lovely song,” said Little Arthur.

“Yes,” said Herbert. “I wonder if we mice had a motherland also in the past?”

“These stories about a wonderful, glorious past are not uncommon and are in the historical consciousness of almost all creatures. Even humans have one, and they think it’s the only one or the first one,” said Vergil laughing. “They are so silly and their history is the shortest. One wonders how they can be so arrogant as to think that their idea of paradise is the only one.”

“Well, you know how humans are,” said Mishmish. “They prefer not to think that they might not be at the top of everything.”

“In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king,” said Mugs. “How could humans ever realize that maybe the smallest insect precede them in every way. Even in paradise.?”

© 2000 A Cat's Tale Dennis Shapiro