A Story

The following is a piece of fiction that I wrote in 2011 for a private contest that had a requirement for a precise 1500-word length. I thought I would see how fiction was received around here. Yes, I kept my day job.

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The Mayflies

Sunshine came from high above when the nymph finished its molt. Now a subimago with new and unfamiliar legs, the female, (for that’s what the mayfly was now) stretched into her first moments of gender. She climbed haltingly along a blade of grass into the bite of the dry air and shivered strongly. Two diaphanous wings curled out and away. Muscles that hadn’t existed a day before made tentative contractions, and unexpectedly the subimago found herself flying free.

Her flight was erratic. Bouncing from one large and largely unrecognizable object to another, she traced a drunken path among what to her tiny and unfocused eyes appeared to be an infinite forest of tall green spikes. Strange colored spots and blotches of hue glowed from uneven places, but of course she couldn’t really tell that because her simple eyes only detected shades of grey. Sounds were mostly unknown to her also, sensitive as she was only to a few high pitches. The senses were all new in this form. She wouldn’t live long enough to actually learn what they all implied.

Thus, she wasn’t really aware when her membranous fore wings buzzed loudly against the petal of a bright yellow flower — itself, like the mayfly, a rare thing this late in the year. The shock of the impact drove her pitifully inadequate aerodynamics off balance, and she careened haphazardly into the pistils, covering herself with orange dust. Had she possessed lungs she would have sneezed, but she possessed neither lungs nor mouth, so instead she wandered off along the ground, leaving behind a small trail of plant dust for the light breeze to carry away. The fly didn’t notice. She was looking for the next wet thing.

Perhaps to lay some eggs, though she didn’t know what eggs were, only that there was a sense of heat and longing that seemed to engulf her whole short existence. Or perhaps she just wanted to huddle down close against something damp to keep herself from desiccating like nearly all of the rest of her generation had done weeks before. Shade could still be found that hid the glare of July’s sun, but it was increasingly rare and many folds and crevasses still soggy and damp from late spring rains passed below, unnoticed.

Of course the mayfly didn’t know any of those things, having only just been born as a flier moments previously. Of what use is a brain to simple insects that live at most only a day, and often only a few hours? Great intelligence was not needed. The subimago strained about in the air, struggling to attain some semblance of level flight, and had almost succeeded when another fly crashed into her and clutched desperately with a pair of sharp forearms. The pair vibrated and tumbled, flailing and lashing out, and then as suddenly as its appearance the affronting individual released its grip and flew straight away, fading quickly out of the range of the female’s rudimentary vision. What was that all about, she wondered, in the rudimentary fashion common to most of her species.

But the intruder was suddenly forgotten when she crashed blindly against something long and bright and she completely lost the rest of her tenuous balance. Fluttering wildly along a straight honed edge that held no menace for the subimago because she was so small, the fly lost all her hard-won altitude and settled into shadow at the edge of a pool of sticky fluid smelling richly of food – the sheerest of chance and the luckiest of luck, for most of the water pools were gone now, the merciless noontime sun having savagely evaporated them into the wind that whisked away their dampness. And now the insistent urge that had been in the back of her mind and in her abdomen since she had metamorphosed into her current form suddenly took on a harsh and violent new intensity.

She fluttered a bit and hopped…and then an explosion grew from her body. Bits and parts flew apart, and a large number of very small objects struck the pool and sank to the bottom, where an entirely new story began, unknown to the subimago. Her short existence was over. She fell backward into a bit of sunshine and stopped moving, never having gotten any true understanding of what had just happened.

Inside one of the tiny eggs a new drama unfolded on a scale unseen by any living eyes. At the very moment of first cellular division, an unusual molecule in the plasma surrounding the egg cluster presented itself at the wrong place at the right time, and a mutation formed in the second cell. As the tiny cluster divided and divided again, half of the new cells carried this mutation forward, and forward again until a new mayfly burst forth into the world with something different about it. As mutations go, it wasn’t much, not even life-threatening – one antennae of this and future generations of this particular mayfly would be missing a segment. A small change, though quite a long time later it would be sufficient to earn the subimago’s descendants distinction as a new species, in the terminology of another lifeform of this world, one that worried about such things. But today, in the general scheme of things, nobody was paying much attention to such tiny happenings.

A different kind of fly moved onto the battlefield, larger, and brutish. These settled straight away onto the greasy lumps they found easily, and grunted and strained to extrude their eggs into the fertile flesh, and then moved on. The afternoon grew long, and the air cooled slowly and grew a little more humid. There was a low, homely sound of buzzing.

The sun set, and crickets began their song. Later that night it rained. Some of the mayfly’s eggs were fortunately flushed away from the sticky pool now turning brown, along rivulets and back into the larger creek, where they continued to divide and grow. Others not so lucky dried up the next day, which proved to be another like the one before, only hotter, and much drier. The other mayflies were dead now, distributed casually among the grass blades, as were the men and boys in blue and grey, and their dogs.

Later, in the autumn, drenching rains came and washed away the last remains. Trees around the field lost their leaves and covered bits of clothing and odd pieces of steel that had been carefully honed and oiled by young men who flung them as they died. Snow came later, in wintertime, and packed down beds of leaves that turned from pale yellow to deep ocher, and finally to a dungy brown. In the next year, and years that came after, the perennial cycle of leaves and snow compacted into soil that hid the metallic evidence of what happened here from scavengers who searched for shiny things to set upon their mantels, miles away. New trees grew up.

Green and lush, the field of the mayflies somehow kept the forest at bay. Seasons came and went, and the field, magically it seemed, stayed whole. Nearby villages, claustrophobic streets of ramshackle buildings, became over time great cities. Endless loops of concrete and asphalt grew like snakes and surrounded the field, yet never crossed over it. In time, a government declared the field and its surrounds a protected place, a monument, and built stopping places for photography, carefully located for visitors to take away memories of standing near where the future of their country had once been decided. The tourists filed the images away, later to forget where they put them. Many were discovered by the children of their children, who wondered where the field was and why their grandparents bothered to remember the place.

In those years, as had been true in every year past, the field’s mayflies died within just a few scant hours of laying their next generation in piles and piles of tiny eggs. Around the edges of the field, where the grass turned to shaded humus, the grey-green leaves died and turned brown, and eventually those other grandchildren died also. Neither of these remembered that hot sticky summer when two great armies came together and hacked each other to bits. In time, even the nation they saved died, and its people sailed across the seas to other places with different green fields that were somehow the same.

And over those distant fields, near streams of water and blood that gave their nymphs life, the mayflies with the strange, short antennae remembered, by dint of their form and their offspring, and the odd chemistry of one 15-year-old soldier who grew up and died near Samuel Getty’s tavern. As it happened, they would hold this memory in the core of their beings for the longest of times, in actual fact until the planet melted away beneath the last generation of nymphs, and the expanding sun above faded permanently into darkness.

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