Chapter 10
She waited on the fly, entomocide on her mind.
Her onions and peppers were trapped in a succulent hell of fidgeting oil, her fingers tense, body rigid with concentration. The iron skillet sizzled. Thrice the fly had circled her head and thrice she ignored it. It was Zen, the ritual of an evening’s meal prepared particularly, singularly, adeptly—the koan of a perfectly flipped omelet or the sound of one egg snapping; her evening encapsulated swiftly by the crackling vegetables unblanched by meat’s soulful temptation; salt and pepper collided in mid-air awash the sea of vaporized oxygen. And in its arrogance it had known nothing of her deepening fury. The fly.
When it screamed into her bangs in a gigue of drunken aerobatics, it must have known its consignment. It must have lost
