Flies

Here is something: Finger-cold, shut out from the fire, we dream the heat. We walk between the close trees and small girls and boys are there, like flies. In the summer the flies speak to me; the flies on the floor of the forest, the flies on the fish, in the rot at the edge of the shore. They speak to me, but not to the other. They say - something? I don't know what they say, I'm too heat lazy to listen, so I ask:

"What do the flies say?"

But they shake their head, like this, and look away. Tears glisten in the corner of their eyes and I put my tongue to them and it's the sea.

"I'm hungry" we say and we are lying on the ground beneath the trees. The children are still there, so are the flies.

"I'm so hungry I could eat  ... "

This is the game for when we should be eating, not playing.

"I'm so hungry I could eat - your shoes"

"I don't have shoes"

"My own shoes then?"

Our feet are naked and together. We are laughing. One of us is this, one of us is that. It all depends on something else.

"I'm so hungry I could eat flies"

Once I put a small black fly in my mouth. I held it there and the buzz was spice, but I couldn't swallow it. I spit it in my palm and it flicks feebly for a while in the drool there, sad, sodden wings, gives up and I let it drip to the ground. One hen saunters by all indifference then turns dips quick and eats it, unsentimental, unmoved. My face is very wet and stupid.

When it's hot and damp, here in the trees, the flies move with us. We take steps in unison and the flies hum a chorus; we stop and they still their noise instantly. However subtle and sly we can be, the flies can be more so. As we doze in the grass here I dream of an immense body made up of these glittering flies.

Through this and out further in the grass a train is coming. We rush to it and press our face to the earth. There is some other mirror-train beneath us and we smile into the buzz of the dirt although we have been told many times not to put our head so close to the tracks as it is asking for trouble. I don't know who told us this.

When both trains stop vibrating we scoop up some of the smaller children, we take them somewhere else.