The television screen buzzes. Reflected into the cramped and untidy living room is the image of the nation’s president. He presides with lips loose, smacking and bouncing like a ventriloquist dummy. The many, multi colored pixels of the old, boxed set arouse the façade of a pressroom, of an always starched suit. Were George to look closer he would find the suit to be a mirage, to be instead a collection of diamonds. Closer still, he would find those diamonds to be increasingly fuzzy cathode deposits. Lines that are not lines fade into buzzing auras of color. The TV up close is like a plane inside clouds that looked beautiful from the ground below. Up here, it’s just condensation. Its just water, just ordinary tap water.
The president is announcing a war on war. He is announcing a changing of the tides, a sacrificing of the old. A step from forest into field. Platitudes bounce down his chest and into newspaper columns already written in the minds of the weary, coffee drunk spooks in the first row.
George huffs in his empty room. Another president, another sunrise. They come and go like lunch. Sometimes they upset his stomach. Sometimes he forgets to eat at all.
The cat bounds into the room. It is chasing something, a black dot that moves and fuzzes. Thomas is an aging boy, but a cat never loses its quick step. Crouched, lithe, ears flat back against the stale air of the living room, the feline eyes its prey. George enjoys these dramas more than those that unfold on the television screen. On his carpet, sometimes the fly escapes.
For a moment, the insect rises and comes to a stop on the screen. It happens to stop on the president’s pixilated cheek, creating a mole, like a supermodel’s beauty mark. George smiles. The fly begins to move, and with him moves the Commander in Chief’s blemish. It is a mole on his cheek. Now, a studded nose ring. It is a bit of spinach on the bottom of his left canine. A cut from shaving. A bite from a mosquito on this bottom of his chin. A renegade blackhead from forgotten teenage years. George’s mind wanders, drifting with the fly that has become a transient tattoo on Old Number 42’s face. The president frowns, as if he knows that an insect in Indianapolis has just made him the butt of a joke.
But there is something about the fly’s blackness that is not quite the same as its background. Something about the tenor or quality which catches George’s eye. Something richer, realer than the hues of the president’s tie. Something that begs inspection. George moves forward out of his chair and to the wool carpet, peering closer. Thomas hisses and bounds off.
When his nose is almost at the set, George realizes that the fly has green eyes. A tiny torso and wings emerge into clarity. With a microscope he would see that each talon contains twenty-three fibrous bristles, and that the eyes themselves are covered in a thin fur. This fly is not a dot. It would be a shame to reduce it to such.
