The Day I Ate a Fly

1976

I was in 4th grade. The kids wore uniforms at this elementary school. The boys wore dark blue corduroy pants, no jeans or shorts, and a collared blue short sleeve shirt. I remember this day being slightly gloomy with a gray sky overhead. It was sweatshirt weather, but not exceedingly cold. This was the day I ate a fly.

At lunch I’d abscond with my lunch pail to our assigned dining area, find an eating partner or two, and eat the thing. There was no cafeteria, you ate what your mamma packed for you. Three faces come to mind as witnesses of the above noted event. We’ll call them Deeney, Goey, and Montagna.

I had been talking to my lunchtime chums and upon concluding my monologue I quickly bit down on my sandwich. I don’t know why I made a spectacle of myself in this manner, perhaps a move of emphasis as to what I had been saying. In any case, I bit and chew.

First they had the look of surprise and horror and this immediately transformed to much laughter. I was told a fly had landed on my sandwich as it was making its vertical ascend toward my pie hole and the fly didn’t make it out. I had taken an initial look at the sandwich then averted my eyes once it was visually cleared for Go. I didn’t see it, the fly, but my sudden movement had apparently captured a usually elusive insect. The perfectly timed reactions of the three was too clean to have been orchestrated off the cuff.

I denied their claim that I had eaten a fly. But I was doing little more really than trying to convince myself of that fact. I chewed and swallowed it, fly and all. I finished the sandwich.


To my knowledge I am yet to eat a caterpillar, worm, beetle, stink bug, spider, or boll weevil.
-klem