Staring at nothing in particular, you sit in the recliner springs groaning under your weight. A dim light leaks into the room through the edges of the drawn curtain. The house smells of dust and the faint metallic tang of something left too long. But you know what the smell is, don’t you? You’ve known for weeks now.
​
It’s her. She’s still on the floor where she fell, wrapped in the same faded nightgown she wore that fateful night. You’ve called no one. You don’t have to. There’s no one to call. No children. No brothers or sisters, not anymore. The two of you chose reclusion, and it suited you; you were two ageing shadows in an old house.

You look at her every day. And when the silence and loneliness become unbearable, you speak to her. She doesn’t answer, of course, and yet in the stillness of the house you feel her presence more than ever. What unsettles you, isn’t her. It’s the fly.

Flies came after she died. At first you cursed them. You swatted in vain as they buzzed around your head. They circled her body, but one kept landing on the rim of your water glass. It had a persistence unlike the others; always returning, hovering near your face, demanding attention.
You’ve become certain that this one was not similar to the rest.

You remember reading about cultures in Asia and Africa whose citizens never kill flies. Sacred carriers, they said. Souls travelling. A second chance, brief as a wingbeat. You’d scoffed back then. But now, with her silent body beside you and this insistent buzzing, the thought had grown.

Today, the fly lands on the armrest of your recliner. Its wings shimmer with a rainbow sheen, delicate and trembling. You lean closer, squinting. It doesn’t flinch, doesn’t dart away as most do. Instead, it walks toward you, slow and deliberate.

Your throat tightens. “It’s you, isn’t it?” you whisper.

The fly pauses, listening.

You smirk. She was your wife, your companion of fifty years, reduced to a creature most people kill without thinking. But you had planned her death. You told yourself it was mercy because she was suffering. The theory explains the fly’s persistence; your former wife is attempting to poison your water.

You start talking. You tell her about the neighbors you haven’t seen in years, about the growing pile of laundry. You confess you haven’t eaten properly since she died. That you love her. But the fly perches on the rim of your water glass, and dips its spindly legs in as if to scold you.
“I know,” you say. “The husband I was, seems unforgivable now.”

Days blur. You forget to wind the clock. You forget the world behind the curtains. But you don’t feel lonely anymore. She’s here, in a form that can’t embrace you, but still here. You imagine she’s watching, waiting, testing whether you’ll keep her alive by respecting what she’s become.

That evening you fall asleep in the recliner. When you wake, the fly is on your nose, wings folded like praying hands. You remember the stories she used to tell you about reincarnation. How every creature had once been a mother, a child, a lover in another life. She’d always spoken of it wistfully, as though she wanted it to be true.

“Is this what you wanted?” you ask her tiny dark body, your voice trembling. “To come back like this? To punish me?”

The fly lifts into the air, buzzing in a slow circle, then settles again on her prior body.

For the first time, you kneel beside her. The fly crawls across her knuckles. You pick up her hand, drop it, and then cover your mouth to keep from sobbing. You realize what she’s asking: not to keep her body, not to keep her here in this half-life of memory and dust. To let her go, to honor the passage.

The weight of the decision presses heavily upon you. You call the authorities.

The police arrive. You tell them the story. Most of it anyway. They glance at the body, then at you, then at each other; their faces masking pity and disgust. Then one of the officers, bothered by the fly, smacks their hands together.

You gasp.

Your wife drops to the floor. She spins in circles on her winged back. Your body moves before thought. The chair topples. As she comes to a halt, you watch intently for movement. Nothing. After tucking her into your pocket, you let the officers cuff you.

They push you through the doorway, past your wife’s previous body and the curtains that haven’t moved in weeks. The air outside tastes different. It’s too bright, too clean. You don’t deserve it. And so, you welcome your new cell. Then, reaching into your pocket, your fingers brush her tiny body. You close your hand around her.

She moves.

You exhale.

​Her temple stood out in the city, like a fang amongst a mouthful of teeth. The confessional, more a divination hut, sat cobbled together from the remnants of a long-abandoned home; its curtain sewn from the tattered banner of her fallen nation. Priestess Juhl waited, but no one came.

The plaza echoed as the wind pushed dust through the cracked colonnades. A dog padded near, sniffed, and left. Under her leadership, the people had fallen. Not through famine or war, but empowerment turned inward on itself.

The curtain rustled. Juhl straightened; the world around her had blurred through the veil of cataracts. “Who approaches?” she asked.

A voice sounded, hollow as an oboe. “I am not of this world.”

The priestess’s knuckles tightened. “From what world do you come?”

“I am a configuration,” the voice said. “An agent of perception from a parallel interface. Your kind calls it another dimension.”

Juhl had always believed that consciousness, not matter, was fundamental. That reality was a user interface, and humans were just icons dancing on the desktop of awareness. And now, here, a voice confirmed the metaphor. And yet she gasped. This voice felt akin but dissimilar.

It continued, “We offer a confession.”

“Why to me?” Juhl asked.

“Our iniquity is silence. Humans fill their void with meaning. This sows the seeds of religious tyranny. We confess complicity in your collapse.”

The priestess’s mouth went dry. Instead of embracing the liminal spaces that expose the limits of meaning and order, she had fallen prey to the spiritual bypass. She too had built an empire on a belief system that proved no more or less true than any other. Along the way she had met a pyrotheologian. One who warned that any gods humans create must burn. That ideology must become embers so that love can blaze unshackled without any targets for blame. She had not listened.

“What do you seek of me?” Juhl asked.

“Absolution.”

Juhl watched as the hut grew vast. The cataracts split from her eyes, and the wooden walls of her hut fell open onto a field of stars. Conscious agents, like geometries of will and perception, flitted like sparks in the dark. Disembodied beings created by her imagination whispered fragments of confession. She had mistaken these icons for the essence; their map for the territory. And now, her world lay shattered beneath that mistake.

“Perhaps ideological death is the last sacrament,” Juhl said.

The curtain fluttered, then split in two. Juhl saw within her own skull her beliefs burn. The cosmic library melted; the oracles turned to embers. Her clairvoyance proved only derealization.

Then silence.

Priestess Juhl opened her eyes to an ash-strewn desert. Her people drew near. Though not at sunrise, the horizon glowed faintly. The atmosphere itself was on fire. Then, kneeling, she pressed her forehead to the ash.

​“We have confessed,” she murmured, then stood. “Now may this fire teach us to love amidst the pain without our fantasies. Let us live out this slow death we call life. Let us burn the idols until nothing remains but the raw, lacking relation between conscious imperfect beings, stripped of illusions and permanence.”

Above her, unseen, countless agents dissolved their forms, releasing the architectures of dogma and control they had woven. Across dimensions, a quiet burning spread, like kindling catching.

Choosing finally darkness over light, Juhl stepped through the crowd in search of the pyrotheologian. His body lay decaying on the ground. A single sapling grew from the hollow below his ribs.