Welcome to Meet Our Little Neighbors, an occasional series about the little guys who live among and around us, but rarely get the attention they deserve.
Recently when a fly barged into my home, uninvited, I left them alone. I was feeling magnanimous and in need of some good karma. Perhaps, I reasoned, the mercy I showed this fly would return to me tenfold on some later date. I watched the fly zig-zag down my hallways and felt smugly philanthropic. How many flies got to live out the rest of their limited days on Earth in a habitat as temperate and well-attended as my pre-war apartment? Its constant buzzing, especially near my face, was annoying, and a part of me blanched each time my eyes strayed from my food, opening up the possibility for the fly to regurgitate its fly juice on my avocado toast. But these were all small, tolerable, annoyances, I reasoned. How long could a fly possibly live?
