Roadkill Cafe, Part 4

The next animal I encountered was actually an insect.  It was a fly.  Floyd didn’t do a lot of flying around, and he was careful to explain why.

Many years ago, especially by the standards of flies, Floyd was trapped in a window.  It happens, especially to flies, so I don’t have much for an explanation, and neither did he.  Anyway, the remarkable thing was when he was discovered, he was set free.  It was a boy, and you’d expect boys, among any humans, to kill the fly, but this one didn’t.  He set Floyd free.

That wasn’t the only remarkable story Floyd had.  He also told me about a journey he took, years after his reported death, in another window, this time the back window of a car, crusted and rigid, discovered by the boy’s sister.  Floyd told me that the boy didn’t believe his sister when she taunted him about it, saying that he’d wasted his efforts, wasted his time.  The fly died anyway.  The boy refused to believe it. 

I don’t know if that somehow explains any of this, that it’s all a matter of belief, that somehow all these animals still exist at the Roadkill Café because of someone’s belief, that it’s some kind of limbo I stumbled across.  I guess it doesn’t much matter.

Floyd took a trip with that same family, buzzing along, years after his death, and this time when his existence was brought up, the boy believed and so did his sister.  Somehow the persistence of vision kept Floyd alive, and that’s as much as I can say about that.

Floyd wasn’t much of a fly, though, not when I met him.  He just sat there.  By definition, flies fly.  I guess that meant Floyd wasn’t much of a fly, but I liked him just fine.  He was humble, just like everyone else there.

And he didn’t want my pity. 

What do you expect?  If this place was some kind of limbo, then its inhabitants couldn’t really be expected to care about life the same way we do.  That much would be accurate, about how humans perceive other life-forms, no matter what they are.  We like to believe we have the monopoly on intelligent thought, that we’re so creative and so that much better than anything else.

My guess is that Floyd proved that wrong, and whether or not it was because of the boy is irrelevant.  Floyd existed before the incident in the window and he existed after it, too.  And then he decided he hated to fly.  I don’t know if that was before or after his death.

If death is something to be considered at the Roadkill Café.