In the second year of the pandemic, in the depths of a blistering mutant summer, amid the throes of planetary climate change, we began to hear talk of an Insect Apocalypse. Certainly, they’d multiplied beyond nightmare. Humans limited their time outside while animals endured and suffered.
We kept our windows closed but, alas, a fly found its way into the house. It was extraordinary because of its meager, even less than traditional, size; in a time when bees had grown to the size of adult thumbs, mosquitos the size of an open hand, and spiders constructed webs that spanned rivers. This tiny throwback to picnics of bygone eras had managed to find sanctuary in our midst, a near impossible feat as we are twenty-one stories up and never open the windows.
At first we took pity, beguiled by the wonder of it.
But the fly was a pest. It loitered on our food, buzzed about our heads when we tried to sleep. took irritating treks on our skin. We waved it off in the hope that it would conform to our ways. But it was defiant in its right to infringe on our lives and prove its superiority.
It was faster than us.
It teased.
It contaminated.
It tortured.
It was confident in its primacy.
We began to believe that this was the thrum of evolution, the New Normal in the form of a revised ascendancy of species.
We acquiesced and the fly accepted our capitulation.
Time passed and we began to accept our amended status. An alternative place in the universe had imposed itself upon us.
One evening as my spouse watched the news and I scanned the newspaper for some evidence of scruple, the fly lingered on the table before me.
Slowly I rolled the paper and adjusted my body to a more forward but unthreatening posture. I raised the ploy.
WHAM!
The experiment in coexistence ended, the insect a smear on the glass, my karma defiled (alas, not the only occasion). A life canceled, the evidence wiped clean with Windex and paper towel. But I’m repentant and will work to stave off further rash instinctive reactions in an effort to improve my standing in the karmic system of a precarious cosmos.

It started with a saxophone, someone on the street who was guided by the pensiveness of the afternoon and the ruby sun which was just settling behind shadowy buildings. The saxophone player was dark and ragged but his sound was pure. Then bells, coming from a window below, I could barely hear them. They came and went, babbled with a shyness borne of regret. They might have been the kind of bells that mother’s put on baby’s shoes, but the musician was no child. I sat at my open window, and quietly hummed a bridge between the two. There were other people on the street, but there were only the three of us in the music: the saxophonist, the bell ringer, and me.
Then the wind drifted into the tune, awkwardly at first, it tickled the dry leaves on the tree but didn’t dare abuse its power and take over the music. An ambulance crept down the street in silence, its passenger beyond help. The saxophonist paused, and was gone. Only low bells marked the passing. And then they disappeared.
I closed my window and addressed the evening.

   I can not say I’ve experienced the “Perfect Storm.” But I’m at the end of a “Perfect Squall.” It began four years ago with a questionable turn in worldly affairs (the flap of the butterfly wing). It escalated a year ago with the onset of Pandemic and the fear and stress that accompanied it. It intensified at the end of December with a month-long bout of “food poisoning/bacterial hurricane,” complicated by tooth ache. And culminated (so I thought) a few weeks ago with the removal of the affected tooth, leaving me traumatized in body, mind, and spirit.
   Grim stories from friends and acquaintances accelerated the spiral. It’s not as if I made a concussive hit onto rock bottom, but I slipped into a muddy murk that sought to pull me further into the abyss. And yet, I am one of the lucky ones! How could this be?
   When I thought I had overcome the Fates, I fell. Literally. In the street, splat! Injuring my hand and knee, but not breaking anything (except my dignity, such that it is). A week later my hand is still painful, my knee still seeps. I ache. Fates to Fool, “Gotcha!!”
   I’m not so muddled as to believe I’m the only one in this situation, or that there aren’t a lot of folks much worse off. So I accept the challenge to persevere, and hopefully lend an (uninjured) hand when the situation allows. I enthusiastically reject the posture of “self-pity,” the lowest of low affectations when I say that when life pulls you into mud and muck, don’t be afraid to roll around, get dirty, and make some mud pies (with your good hand).

   I woke in the middle of the night expecting darkness, and was surprised by the brightness of streetlights and dim windows reflected and magnified by impish snowflakes as they fell in infinite numbers. Hypnotized by the kinetic movement beyond my lodgings, I drifted into asleep.
   In the morning I felt the brush of cold on my skin as a phantom flake landed and melted. Snow had begun to infringe on my inner domain. It manifest as mote and mist that not only gathered in the space around me, but clouded the mind, leaving a chill of existential anxiety. I scaled a shaky ladder to inspect the ceiling, the roof, but there was no breach. I combed through my hair, inspected my skin, but there was no entry point. I closed my eyes. The delicate assault continued, within and without. Minute ice crystals, carefully crafted by an omnipotent alchemist’s hand had invaded space, time and memory. I’ve become complacent in its grasp.
   The storm outside may subside with the whim of nature, but inside there is no just season.