Three Ton Coworker - Maelstrom of Fruit Flies
". . . he called me the averter of flies / that my wife one day would bear one child with a golden thigh" —Frank Stanford, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, lines 538-9
Down the hall, there were noises like perhaps he was back from his vacation, but I didn't want to go into the kitchen to see if his coffee machine was there, the one he had taken with him. Who takes a coffee machine with them on vacation? Better: Who takes a single-serve coffee machine with them on vacation?
Whatever, it sounded like he was back and now maybe someone would remove the compost and its maelstrom of fruit flies from the balcony. I had been thinking I would do it myself as it would allow me to be grossed out by the maggots in the larger compost bins, but I did kind of also like the way the fruit flies aggressively swirled up towards me whenever I opened the lid on the compost on the balcony.
It sounded like he was back, and now maybe we might get to hear more late-night screaming at or about immigrants who refuse to integrate themselves into a society which refuses to allow them to integrate. The people here are of course no different from the people anywhere who say, "Oh me? I'm not racist. I love all those different people."
But then the noise down the hall had stopped, and so perhaps I was wrong, and I really was going to have to deal with the fruit flies and also the maggots myself even though I didn't want to. And maybe there wasn't going to be yelling. And maybe the single-serve coffee machine, the kind that uses those little foil-sealed packets so you can't see the coffee you're about to brew and so how do we know this isn't just a way to sell instant coffee without having to say so, maybe it's not back on the counter, and the electric tea kettle is still just sitting there next to the television that only seems to show the news and documentaries about people born after the last war but before the 60s really got underway. I don't know what that generation is called here.