“Mrs. Milton?”
Hearing her name being called from the other side of the closet door Annie screamed to be let out … she didn’t care who was there, which man it was this time, she wanted out.
When the door opened Annie came rushing into the room but still kept the jacket protectively over her head. “Bees!” she shouted. “Bees!” Then she was embraced by whoever had opened the door and he laughed and told her, “No, honey, they’re just flies.”
Cluster flies, the kind that swarm livestock in the summer, that will cover a horse’s face by the hundreds … big fat flies that cluster in hibernation-like swarms inside the walls of buildings and if these clusters are disturbed the flies will buzz loudly like bees and try to reform their clusters. In the closet they swarmed Annie’s face not to attack her but in an effort to find each other and reassemble.
She finally pulled the jacket down from her head and saw that dozens of the flies were still buzzing around her, flies just like those that were behind that rotting window shade she pulled down, that settled on Paul and got caught in his hair. Not swattable little domestic houseflies, these were heavy and loud and if you squashed one of them there’d be a mess to clean up, they were that big.
In Annie’s hair now, she brushed at them wildly and said, “No! No!” Not bees, thank God they weren’t bees, but she still didn’t want them on her, she was still repulsed whenever one landed in her ear or on her lip.
As Annie continued flailing at the flies, ducking her head to escape them, the man who’d let her out of the closet laughed again and grabbed Annie’s wrists. “Honey they’re just flies.”
She looked up at him.
“Just big ol’ fat flies,” he said, brushing at her hair with one hand as he held her right wrist with his other hand. “You remember me?”
Annie did, of course she did.