As for the fly I chased around the bathroom with a towel that night, swatting, slapping, thrashing, pounding,
kicking with one foot the toothbrush cup onto its side, dislodging the tea curtain with a misplaced elbow,
unable for all my efforts to terminate his gallant loops and arabesques, his beeline dives and fighter-pilot vectorings,
his stalls and silences, his crafty retreats, his increasingly erratic bursts toward any open corner or avenue of escape,
behind the toilet, above the shower rod, inside the light wells, disappearing like a magician only to reappear again and again—
as for the fly, our struggle went on a long time. Too long. It was already after midnight when it began, the house calm,
everything dark beyond our gladiatorial arena, crazy to bother, ridiculous to carry on, but I was determined to finish it.
And when he stopped at last, gone for good, the body unseen but certainly dead, pulverized at a blow, squashed and unrecoverable,
when that silence was assured I felt certain of a conquest too small to call a triumph but a victory nonetheless.
And when, the next day, lifting a fresh towel from the bar, he fell to the floor, not dead but irreparably damaged,
lurching, toppling, lopsided, wing-still, no longer jittering with defiance, no longer challenging fate with desperate brio,
when I discovered him then everything had changed, and we were no longer fated to deadly opposition,
no longer entranced by the simplicity of our struggle, and I no longer understood the antagonism of the night before,
felt entirely alien from it, felt now that it was a perturbing frenzy, a kind of madness that had possessed me.
Which did not mean that he did not have to die, only that it was not, or not anymore, an act of murder but a cost of war,
or so I told myself, adorned in the common skin of my kind, naked before the mirror in the exalted light of morning.