Assistant Editor Lily Meyer: In “Fruit Flies,” Giboba Ramm transforms a mundane problem—a “minor infestation” of fruit flies—into the starting point for a meditation on the consequences of both reproduction and killing, and, ultimately, on human belief in our own supremacy. How many flies would a person need to kill in order to be condemned for it, he asks? And why isn’t the answer just one?
Fruit Flies
A fruit fly zips over the coffee table—up! and out of sight. It whips back on its slingshot trajectory, orbiting whatever rotting or ripening matter might be left out in the room, and I think: Here we go, the harbinger of minor infestation is come, as though they’d ever left.
The fruit flies first appeared last summer, maybe earlier. Most likely there were eggs on the bananas I’d bought from Safeway. Well, the eggs hatched, and the flies—no larger than a blackhead, with wings small even for an insect—were everywhere: on the lip of the trash and recycling bins; hovering over the sink and toilet; and more alarmingly, dead on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, their bodies cold and dehydrated and halfway to dust. That, I couldn’t understand. Surely, they must realize . . . There must be some instinct . . . Don’t they know that they’re killing themselves, and so needlessly? I chucked out the food and swept up the bodies.
A warm, grassy summer stretched on as I adopted a know-thy-enemy approach. Did you know that fruit flies can lay up to five hundred eggs in a single sitting [sic], and around two thousand eggs per day? Have you considered their compound eyes—red, mimicking raspberry drupelets—which distinguish them from the other various species of fly? Were you aware they’ve been studied and dissected in Nobel Prize–winning research, so eager are we to understand how they (and so admirably so) go forth and multiply? Abraham would blush.
I hung flypaper and watched their legs, hardly an eighth of blond eyelash, adhere to it. I tipped apple cider vinegar into small Tupperware containers, coaxing them to sip, knowing they’d drown. (Drunk off sweet ammonia, they swarmed over the amber liquid and the little lifeless shadows already lying underneath.) I bought fogger and set it off before going to work. When I returned, how I was relieved to see dozens of paltry brown husks stretched along the sun-bleached windowsill.
I wondered how many fruit flies a person could kill before God might take notice. Probably zero, or as many as they’d like. In any case, I’d done away with hundreds. Why? Because they’d shuffle their arms before nibbling my pizza. Because they’d dive down in my beer, fancying a few laps. Because they’d fly up my nose or go spelunking down my ears. Or maybe, more sinisterly, because they do not look like me. So far from me that I fail to recognize their being. As though their little lives held no value. A somewhat-torn body so small, you could hardly call it killing. Nothing more than food for spiders.
Giboba Ramm is a writer based in Bethesda, Maryland. He is currently attending the University of Virginia.
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