Fly

Fly is a recurring creature whose significance lies in its movement between the ordinary and the unbearable. It appears around food, corpses, animals, roads, windows, and institutional rooms, repeatedly disturbing spaces that people try to keep orderly. Through Fly, the narrative makes mortality and psychic disintegration tactile: the insect is small enough to dismiss, yet persistent enough to expose what domestic routine, family respectability, and medical calm attempt to conceal.

Presence in Grief and Domestic Decay

Fly first becomes inseparable from the aftermath of death in the Mother-in-Law’s house. After the Father-in-Law’s funeral, the Mother-in-Law continues washing his trousers, cooking for two, changing pillowcases, and mending underwear torn at the crotch. Her routine persists even though her husband is gone, making the house feel inhabited by a life that has lost its reciprocal partner. In this setting, Fly is not merely an annoyance. The Mother-in-Law does not scare the insects away or remove the eggs they have laid in the jar of homemade chestnut jam, while she eats bread that has been left in the kitchen for days. The contaminated jam and stale bread register a world in which ordinary acts of care have become automatic gestures detached from preservation or pleasure.

The Narrator watches the Mother-in-Law’s fingers bring the bread to her mouth as though they belonged to somebody else, and sees her choke. Fly therefore accompanies a divided relation to the body: the hand continues to perform, but the person no longer seems fully present within the action. The insect’s eggs remain inside the jam as grief suspends time, and the kitchen becomes a material image of the widow’s perpetual limbo. The flies do not symbolize grief in any single, stable way; instead, they make its persistence visible through neglected food, unattended contamination, and the failure of household boundaries.

Extermination as Rural Routine

In the Narrator’s country life, killing insects becomes one of the activities she says she has come to relish. Fly has followed the family since prehistoric times, and she treats that immense duration as an argument for extinction: while spreading quince jelly, she traps the insects inside the jar by twisting the lid and watches them slide through the jelly. The scene turns food into a killing device and observation into entertainment. The flies’ struggle is not hidden; it is prolonged, contained, and made available for inspection.

The Narrator places this act beside other forms of casual extermination. She allows Spiders to drown in the sink, runs hot water over the stronger ones when they resist, electrocutes Bees from the swing, punishes a Wasp, helps the Son stuff clusters of Ants into matchboxes and set them on fire, stamps on Worms and grasshoppers, and leaves cups of beer for slugs until they drown. Fly belongs to an entire rural taxonomy of small lives converted into household objects, experiments, or spectacles. Yet Fly is distinctive because it occupies food and because its ancient persistence is explicitly remembered. Its extermination joins domestic consumption to destructive power while also revealing the Narrator’s appetite for control.

That appetite is sharply contrasted with the dog’s bodily disorder. When the new Dog urinates under the table and breaks the Narrator’s glass, she refuses to get up or wipe away the puddle. The animal follows the urine to the Husband’s slippers, while the Narrator remains seated with her trousers unbuttoned. Fly belongs to the same field of dirt, leakage, and irritation, but unlike the dog it has no claim on family membership. The Husband wants to name the dog and make it part of the family; the Narrator would simply call it Dog. The distinction exposes a household struggling to decide which forms of animal life may be absorbed into domestic order and which must be destroyed.

Flies, Animals, and Desire

Fly also expands the rural landscape into a zone where human and animal bodies repeatedly overlap. In the evening, flies stop buzzing around horses’ eyes after tormenting the animals whenever they blink. They rise in black spools and dark swirls, leaving the horses blind and alone. The image gives the insects a collective, almost mechanical force, but it also makes their violence intimate: the smallest creature can interrupt the sight of the largest animal, turning vision itself into a site of attack.

The Narrator imagines the flies as part of the family’s gradual submission to the radiation of Infidelity. She reaches through barbed wire separating beasts from men and longs for a Horse to gallop with its jaw open, releasing Desire. Here Fly does not simply stand outside human sexuality; it helps establish the contaminated border from which the Narrator imagines crossing. The buzzing around horses’ eyes, the wire between animals and people, and the body stretched on filthy ground all participate in a language of appetite that rejects the clean divisions of marriage, family, and civilized conduct.

The recurring insects also sharpen the contrast between desire and death. The Narrator wants a body that will leave her shaken like the sight of a dying animal, and describes passion through animal figures such as the cow with a trapped head and the Stag entering the woods as a bridegroom enters a church. Fly’s presence around the horses makes erotic intensity inseparable from blindness, irritation, and physical vulnerability. The insect is therefore part of the narrative’s larger animal vocabulary, but its specific function is to swarm around perception and make the boundary between attraction and violation unstable.

Roadside Crisis and Mental Noise

During the Narrator’s winter Sunday crisis, Fly moves from the house into her perception of public space. After threatening to leave, she stands in the middle of the road with a straw hat and suitcase while bicycles, lorries, and lame dogs dodge her. She describes flies in her eardrums, turning an external rural nuisance into an internal acoustic pressure. The road is crowded with vehicles and legal danger, yet the most persistent threat is inseparable from her own disturbed sensing.

She remains beside the road as though she were an insect with its antennae raised, a scarecrow waiting for signals. The comparison reduces her to a creature exposed to traffic, noise, and impact, but it also gives her a heightened, nonhuman sensitivity. She mistakes distant sounds for her vibrating phone: a meow becomes a greeting, a hammer blow becomes an incoming call, and the road’s murmur becomes mental noise. Fly thus becomes part of a system in which perception loses its stable reference. External sounds are not received as evidence; they are transformed into projections of expectation.

The roadside scene joins Fly to maternal fear and anticipated erasure. The Narrator imagines being run over, covered in brown blood, or thrown against a corrugated garage door, while observers would pity only the little boy left without a mother. The insect image makes her exposed body seem both negligible and violently vulnerable. Her waiting for a call that never comes is accompanied by the feeling that the mobile phone is burning her hand. Fly’s buzzing and the phone’s imagined vibration belong to the same distorted circuit of desire, abandonment, and failed communication.

Institutional Window and Persistent Motion

Fly reappears when the Narrator enters the institution. On the first morning, after dreaming that the Son had been left under acid rain, she sees a small iridescent fly strike the glass of the window again and again until it collapses, scattering pieces of bright blue wing across the bed. The insect’s repeated impact gives physical form to a motion that cannot achieve passage. The window is transparent but closed; the Fly can see beyond it yet cannot convert vision into escape.

The scene reverses the earlier domestic exterminations. In the kitchen, the Narrator deliberately traps and kills flies in quince jelly. In the institution, she does not kill the Fly, but watches its repetitive assault end in collapse. Its death is produced by the structure it confronts: the glass remains intact while the insect’s body is broken against it. The contrast makes the creature a figure for confinement without requiring it to become a direct allegory. The Fly’s small body simply reveals the violence of an apparently clean boundary.

The institution initially appears calm, clean, and comfortable, almost like a hotel. The Narrator feels newly alive, greets people, kisses cheeks, shakes hands, and walks into the grounds, while the Fly’s destruction occurs in the private space of the bedroom. This juxtaposition complicates the promise of recovery. Her outward sociability and the establishment’s cleanliness coexist with a repeated collision, a collapse, and bright fragments left on the bed. Fly preserves the narrative’s insistence that disorder has not vanished merely because it has been placed behind walls or given medical supervision.

Narrative Function and Significance

Across these scenes, Fly repeatedly unsettles the distinction between background detail and central psychological fact. It infests jam after the Father-in-Law’s death, becomes prey in the Narrator’s household games, swarms around the eyes of Horses, enters the soundscape of the roadside crisis, and dies against institutional glass. The recurrence is formally important because each appearance changes scale: Fly is first part of a neglected kitchen, then an object of deliberate cruelty, then a collective force, then an extension of disturbed sensation, and finally a solitary body destroyed by an invisible barrier.

The creature also participates in the book’s defamiliarization of routine. Food, driving, waiting for a telephone call, caring for a child, and entering a medical facility might ordinarily be described through recognizable social procedures. Fly interrupts those procedures with buzzing, eggs, jelly, blind Horses, imagined vibrations, and broken wings. Familiar life becomes strange not through a supernatural transformation but through the insistence of material details that respectable language would prefer to ignore.

Fly’s deepest consistency is its relation to failed boundaries. The jam should preserve food but contains eggs; the home should separate cleanliness from infestation; barbed wire should divide beasts from men; the road should organize movement; glass should permit sight while preventing passage; the institution should offer calm while enclosing its occupants. In every case, Fly exposes the weakness of the boundary. It is small, repetitive, and apparently insignificant, yet its persistence gives the narrative a material grammar for grief, violence, desire, alienation, and confinement.