I Heard Beelzebub When I Died

A fly scuttles across the yolk of my eye but I don’t blink. I just lay and watch the light’s laggard eclipse. The radiance tilts, angling into shafts- lines of falling light, teetering then toppling into darkness. And though it barely last a moment, a glint glimpse of night during the sultry afternoon, I find solace in that artificial blink. Like when my eyelids swathe my hazel irises at night, my eyes now cuddle against the dying of the light.
The fly’s legs look like naked boughs raped by an fiery drought, thin, black and bending in the most arbitrary directions. Tiny hairs sprout from its feet like sharp stems that could never produce a leaf. From afar its feet must seem like six fine hairs, followed by scarlet footprints that sprawl like vines or veins across the glazed surface of my eye.
It must think I’m dead. Its casual pace doesn’t hint even the slightest trepidation. No pause or stammer in its step. Neither does it speak or even whisper with its two tongues that ordinarily just buzz away. It’s silent as it ambles over my eyelashes encrusted thick in solid tears.
Another fly scampers across my nose, circling my nostrils, trekking over the dried mucus which buries my chestnut skin under a pallid gray crust. Yet another buzzes around my mouth, indecisively ascending and descending upon the souring scabs on the corners of my lips. It thinks I’m dead but isn’t sure. It seems that even the simplest of creatures, somewhere in that infinitesimal consciousness have this most primal of instincts, paranoia.
The nurse saunters by me, barely glancing my way as she taps my bed and counts in some local Sudanese dialect. The flies stir, a few take to the air but quickly settle back down, immediately reclaiming their insouciant stroll. The nurse continues ambling by, counting the makeshift beds: dried grass draped with plastic bags and recycled towels all atop a wooden rest with rusted nails crooked around the corners.
“Seven,” she shouts. Her voice echoes slightly under this improvised tent. Five long metal bars stabbed deep into the dry soil, dust and dried grass bleed out onto the foot of the metal poles. Four of the poles are places in each corner and the longest stands high in the center. A large white plastic covering is tied to the bars in some recipe of rope, metal wiring and Christmas tree lights. “Yes, seven dead,” she confirms and a man standing at the entrance of the tent steps outside.
She thinks I’m dead. It must be the flies. How ironic it is that flies find such life in death. All I see is abortion upturned as maggots are birthed from unwanted corpses, not sucking but devouring the nipple. Though my more immediate paradox is that my starvation will provide them the greatest feast of their short lives. But Africa is full of contrariety. Here in Sudan the most valuable resource flows through the land with such abundance that it has brought great wealth to the country but it’s there is no water. Disease has discovered a means to translate reproduction into extinction. And with all this poverty and disease the cradle of mankind has become his coffin.
The journalists step into the tent. The light pours in, sharpening the shadows that laid so lifeless a moment before. A fresh breeze from outside pushes a few of the flies into a scatter off of my face, they break like glass and shatter into every direction. Their buzz cracks the silence. The journalists immediately scramble to get the papers, pens, cameras, anything in their hands, over their noses. I hadn’t noticed the smell. I guess I had laid here for so long that I have become accustomed to the scent of rotting flesh.
Some of the journalists turn their heads and clamp their lips shut, others dip their noses into the collar of their shirts. The nurse passes them small squares of toilet paper, single ply. The cheap brands that they’ve probably seen on the bottom shelves of department stores. The ones that made them feel better about buying the discounted double ply brands.
Their eyes redden and moisten in the corners. But not from grief. The pungent rank compels them to pinch their noses. They squash their nostrils into two ovoid holes, with the toilet paper swaddling the bridge. Like that’s going to help. The scent of death is a snake. It slithers through even the smallest crevices with a venom that corrupts the soul. And the nose, their sense is forever scarred, no one ever forgets this rank or mistakes it for another.
A stout, white man notices me and begins to trail away from the cluster of white bodies still loitering at the entrance of the tent. The professional looking camera dangling from a strap around his neck judders against his chest as he steps towards me, with the most annoying clicking and clacking resonating from its tightly fastened bands. Stub hairs and sprawling wrinkles decorate the man’s chubby face. He seems to have lost the battle with age, his hair has retreated to the back of his head and I can almost see his mind as he runs his hands along his moist, sun-burnt scalp.
He investigates my every feature like fresh fruit in a grocery store. His eyes slide down my neck and as he squints I can almost feel the squeeze in my throat. He then looks to my ribs, that appear as a bouquet of auburn bananas striving to be born from my chest. His eyes stroke down my flaccid arms dangling over the side of this makeshift bed, devoid of meat or muscle just flesh draped over bone like a sheet on the clothesline. The Sudanese sun is seemingly melting my flesh into another hazel puddle on the dark soil.
The man has attracted the attention of his peers. They venture over with their eyes propping up against the inside of their rectangular glasses, bulging out their sockets. One aging white woman forms an ‘o’ with their lips and places her finger tips over their mouth. Another older gentleman with a rounded belly, strips his hat off of his sweat moistened gray hairs and places it against his chest. They must think I’m dead. They all think I’m dead.
The stout man strips the camera from around his neck in dramatic fashion. He scrunches one eye shut and eclipses the other behind the camera’s eyepiece. As the black lens refracts refracted light I think I see the world behind that lens looking back at me. Every nationality and race glimpsing upon suffering at a pause, starring at my suspended agony. And even after I pass away, my corpse rotting in some shallow grave, I will haunt empathy and loiter in this suffering, this searing afternoon, suffering for an eternity. He pushes the trigger.
Light stabs deep into my eyes, tears bleed out onto the cusp of their ducts, but I don’t blink. My pupils shrivel like grapes to raisins and my throbbing retina blurs the curious crowd hovering in front of me from four to fourteen. They buzz too. Their lips look like wings, flapping with such fury that wrinkles, dimples, and slight puffs in their cheeks, rise and fall; each word is a raindrop undulating upon their cheeks. The conversations jump quickly, from him to her to them, then they go away, to feast their eyes on another body, another Sudanese refugee, another caption of poverty, starving or diseased, because that’s what flies do, sound and fury, nothing.
At this instant I feel I’m dead. As the flies flood back like a shadow crawling over the shadows upon my face. Their wings quake slightly but they don’t fly, like black angels fallen from above, cursing the azure sky.
When you die sight is the first to go. The light drains out of your pupils like water pirouetting down the basin. Then touch- your skin hardens- frigid- freezing, your nerves coil like a cold fetus or frightened shrimp. The tongue dries up like some beached sponge in the dark, the lips crushing out all light. And the echoes of your last breath fade out from the canals of the nose. No scent would dare to venture in again. But you can still hear, for a while, clearer even, as your corpse is hollowed out of sound. And I can hear them. I can hear them buzz.