The flies! the bloody flies!

As soon as we get a bit of warmth, a bit of sun, you have to keep all the windows and doors closed unless you want a massive black buzzing blob to-ing and fro-ing across your field of vision while you’re trying to work. Or one gently landing on you a thousand times a minute when you need to concentrate.

There always seems to be one circulating in the centre of the room, silently drawing out a pentacle under the living room light.

Why are there so many of them? What are they for?

A friend of mine thinks he knows. He pointed out the ones that circle more lazily and ever more slowly, like they’re running out of batteries. That got him thinking. As did a cold snap which took meteorologists by surprise. And the flies too, it seems, because there was no let up in their peregrinations. Didn’t they normally disappear when autumn came?

A practical man, my friend. Never let a mystery go unexamined. Fly on the wall, he thought. Who’d not give something to be a fly on the wall? That’s what they say.

What if? he said. What if that explains the buzzing? What if the seasonality’s just a cover? That cold snap caught Them unawares. They never had time to recall them.

Fly drones. Watching us. Little cameras, too fast to intercept. Too fast for us normal folk, at least. I thought he was jumping to conclusions, making fly-like leaps.

And then he managed to catch one. A fly that had been in his house for too long, seemingly surviving without food. He took it into his shed, and pulled apart its glistening parts, its buzzing components. Did he find what he was looking for?

I’ll ask him if I bump into him, but I’ve not seen him for weeks.