From: Darla

Subject: Re: Can U Top This? (was: Conversation with a spider)

Date: Friday, July 23, 1999 7:49 PM

  Little Billy Newcomb <nuke@best.com> wrote:

  > WARNING: Stop reading here if you do not deal well with swarms of

> insects. While I was living in the same scummy college-student house that the

> above events took place in, something died in a wall.  At some point,

> there were dozens of flies on said wall...

  While I was living in a small studio apartment in San Francisco in the summer of 1977, I began to notice an unpleasant odor.  After two or three days of increasing discomfort I complained to the super, who admitted that others had complained and theorized that kids had probably thrown a dead animal down the airshaft.  He would take a look, he said.  That was a Wednesday.

  On Friday, I opened my apartment door on my way out to the Owl Market, and was knocked back by a solid wall of stench.  Holding my jacket over my mouth and nose, I peered over the banister and saw a man in a black suit casually leaning against the staircase and staring into the open door of the apartment below mine.  He heard me gag and looked up.  He shrugged.

  "Suicide.  Did you hear anything?  We figure it's been about a week."

  I pulled my jacket over my head and ran into the elevator, then through the lobby and outside, gasping for some fresh air.  A young cop was vomiting in the gutter.  An older cop spoke to me.

  "Live in there?"

  I nodded.

  "Which apartment number?"

  I told him, and he too asked if I had heard anything.  I hadn't.

  "How? Where?" I choked out.

  "Gun.  We figure in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.

It's bad, maybe a week, 10 days old.  Hot in there too; living room window wasn't open more than a crack.  Jesus."

  He hitched up his pants and poked his head toward the young cop, who was wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.

  "He's new.  Never seen this before."

  My stomach was churning.  I went across the street to the Owl Market, but no longer for food.  I used the pay phone and called every friend I knew in the City.

No one answered.  I had to go back in there and stay the night.  Home alone.

  A week or 10 days later--- I can't remember anymore-- I swam up toward consciousness on a Saturday wondering why the alarm was buzzing.  I cracked an eye and wondered why it was still so dark.

  Dark.

  Buzzing.

  Both eyes popped open and I sat up, staring horrified at the living room windows.  The ones directly above his living room windows.  They were black with flies--- hundreds, thousands of flies--- blotting out the light, hatched, I knew, in the decomposing body that lay on the floor below me for ten days.  While I watched TV, while I talked on the phone and ate my dinner and wrinkled my nose at the funny smell.

  The super had to call the owner, who had to send a team of exterminators.

  Still, all the rest of the summer I imagined I could hear buzzing, and that the smell clung to me like the blundered-into web of an artisan spider.

  Darla

--- <shudder>