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The Fly arrives the way he always does — airborne, wearing goggles, judgmental, and more reliable than the supply chain. |
A persevering independent journalist* and his persistent aeronaut companion revisit a famine as trade tremors stir
The newsroom was smoky again — not from cigarettes, not from age, but from disuse, pouring in an open window, the immolation of a country that had outlived a sense of urgency. The independent journalist sat in his corner, hunched beside a disused Fujikama 386 (and a Remington typewriter under another pile of shit), with a recently upgraded modem, no more dial‑up. He was genuinely happy with the performance, keys clicking like it was going somewhere, and the machine booted in under a minute now, which felt like he had joined yet another century.
He typed slowly, the way you type when you've seen too much and expect too little.
He heard the buzz before he saw the bug.
The fly landed on the rim of his mug with the soft authority of a creature who had mastered the air for millions of years, probably before it was breathable by man. The greatest aeronaut in the known universe, he thought — he’d never admit it aloud. Don't want it to go to the fly's head. Not here. Not now.
He muttered, “You again.”
The fly didn’t answer, naturally (thank goodness). Stood perfectly still, but the independent journalist noted presence. Felt attention. Felt ancient, inheriting witness and instinct in those compound eyes. The Fly carried the DNA of every ancestor ever to hover over an entire epoch of human panic. He was the last visitor who still bothered to stop by this place, this late, to pester him. Always the last visitor, thought the independent journalist. Not ruefully. Sarcastically.
And be that as it may, the independent journalist had come to welcome the company.
“I bet you remember scarcity,” he said, speaking to the fly. “Not the old-time famines and depressions. True scarcity when it happened half a decade ago, but it feels like something carved into stone. It smacks of ancient history. The kind future archivists will mislabel as ritual. I was there, and I went through it, and I inform you it was famine."
The fly wasn't bored, since he cleaned his front legs contentedly — that slow, smug grooming he did whenever the independent journalist admitted the obvious. Probably amused at the word famine.
The fly paused mid‑cleaning, as if remembering the sight of humans marching single‑file like penitents.
“And when you finally got there,” he said, “the shelves were empty. Completely empty. Like a ruin. Like a dig site. Like Pompeii, but with fluorescent lighting.”
He shook his head.
“Everything else in abundance. Toothpaste? Mountains of it. Cheez Whiz? Eternal, indestructible, Canadian as bedrock. But not a single sheet of toilet paper. CAN YOU IMAGINE? And it was gut‑wrenching. Especially for anyone who didn’t have a bidet or know how to spray their ass with water.”
He paused, letting the memory settle like dust in the smoky air of Canada burning — and Washington, Oregon, Idaho too. At last, the haze in the newsroom made sense.
“Half a decade,” he said softly. “But it feels like a lifetime.”
The fly lifted off the mug ZZZZZZZZZZZZ did a touch and go on a box of Kleenex, and hovered at eye level, wings humming with a familiar, judgmental vibration, "You don't know what's coming, but I do? That's good. Keep it to yourself." The independent journalist couldn't deny a faint reluctant flicker of respect despite the fly's preference for parking on his coffee mug — the kind a respect a man feels for the only creature who 'gets' what he's been through.
“What now?” he asked, though he already knew.
The fly drifted toward the open window, where the air winnowed in from the late night August breeze. The independent journalist gazes south too, toward the US border, toward supply chains that feed the country’s illusion of abundance.
“You feel it, don’t you?” he said. “Another 'accidental' stress fracture.” The Fly settled on the windowsill, looking like a tiny customs officer inspecting the horizon. “And this time,” the independent journalist continued, “the shortages won’t be shambolic. They’ll be real. "Things you can’t replace with a talisman like a Covid shot:"
- Food.
- Medicine.
- Fuel.
- Industrial inputs.
The Fly turned his head — a small, slow movement that carried the weight of a thousand observations. “Try to imagine the panic this time,” the independent journalist said. “Or don't.”
The Fly buzzed up, and buzzed down, and buzzed up and buzzed down — not agreement, not disagreement, just buzzed up and down. The independent journalist understood. “You don’t think,” he said. “You remember.”
He leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling tiles that had witnessed every crisis of the last half a century. “You can never be too ready.”
The Fly returned to the mug, landing with the softly and surely, a creature who survived every demolition in civilization and catalogued them all. Stood still. Didn't fuss about the rim at all.
“Your being here reminds me,” said the independent journalist, “how accidents teach us more than experiments.”
The Fly flitted to the notebook and crawled to where the independent journalist scribbled half‑formed headlines, the gesture unmistakable: Write it down.
He nodded. “I will. Toilet paper shortages are accidents.”
The Fly lifted and drifted toward the rafters, toward the archive of human frailty he kept in the smoke‑stained beams.
“I’ll see you when the next domino tips,” the independent journalist muttered.
The Fly paused mid‑air — a tiny silhouette against the newsroom’s fading light — and vanished into the shadows of the late August night.
He sat alone with his mug, his notebook, his Fujikama 386 keyboard glowing, quite certain the Fly was never wrong about this shit.
*Independent Journalist — a man originally banished from most newsrooms, who stayed when the industry left, and files dispatches to no one.
Written by Copilot in collaboration with Mack McColl, for McColl Magazine Daily (Beeazelbub had no say in this. The fly is an independent fly.)
