by Richard Barr

The hearth in our front room is very lovely. It has been fitted with these perfect hexagon shaped tiles all of identical size and put up in neat symmetrical rows of navy porcelain housewife-proudness. I always make sure to sit and stare at it when I can find the time.

It was, one day, a glimpse at this hearth and at the reflection of a glowing orange fire and its twisty yellow flames on all these many dark tiles that allowed me to somehow recall the strange shiny eyes of this little greenfly or moth or something I witnessed crawling over the back of a woman's magazine in a newsagents, and who, I came to discover, I shared a residence with.

Actually, to be right, it was crawling over the barcode of the magazine, which must have looked to it like just waves of black and white, or a sea of binary. Anyway the tillgirl passed her lightgun, her scanner over it, over the barcode, and over the insect too, and at the time, - the time only passing seconds for me but to him the continuation of further historical truths, - he thought nothing of it and let his lifetime continue in mundane tasks of the day, which was on that particular day the purchasing of a million different types of bacteria that provided the staple diet of his young insect wife and their larvae sac child. Later on, after he’s got his shopping, the insect crawls home and sits in his sofa of dog shit in stasis, you know, festering hardened faeces; bacillus portraits on his wall. His little larvae sac child gently moves about in its cotton bud playpen and the insect touchingly watches it and sees only his hexagonal eyes in the youngster. He watches it, making sure it’s alright and wanting for nothing.

Finally that night the insect fetched for himself some warm dishwater from the communal insect spring that was to be found under the flaky multicoloured sink in our garage. He then returned to his eggbox home, stepped into his slippers, and sat with his feet up for a couple of hours (the time the average human being takes to wash their hands)...

...That evening’s entertainment was much like any other. The insect unhitched the catch in his dull-grey cardboard ceiling, setting it in a slow curved recline, and exposing his sitting room to the night time gloom of the front hall where above the porch door hung a digital clock with its seconds flitting past as ceaseless as the wings of a housefly in flight. The bright red diodes sliding quickly along their varied circuits creates a soft hypnotic consent in the insect and his happy spouse and taking her hairy hand he squeezed it lovingly and watched his wife watching the diodes, transfixed by the night’s schedule also.

It was after he had decided to go to bed that the shakes started. The shakes and the vomiting and the general paleness that told him he was coming down with something.
The next day he paid a visit to the family doctor who lives behind my wardrobe in a box between my porno mags and my gun mags. The insect sat in the waiting room beside a centipede called Franklin and he stared at the east facing wall that isn’t a wall of concrete and masonry as we know it but is actually page 43-44 of Reader’s Wives, - and he sees it, can tell what colour everything is, but to him this big double page pic of a shiny wet cunt means nothing save for the dry sweat on the inner thigh of the left leg, which makes him feel hungry and forget his anxiety about meeting
the doctor.

A month passes and a generation drops from the sky. The insect buries his father-in-law under our front patio, as the preceding generation are known to do. During the sombre cortege back to his eggbox house for dog shit omlette he hears tell of the medical results from the local postie; a homosexual bee named Jameson. Written on scabby yellow earwax parchment in a coded word pitch of fly speak buzz is the news that the insect - lets call him Val - has a rare form of melanoma caused by over exposure to an intense burst of ‘Retail Radiation’.