Shoo fly

At the yard sale on Saturday, I sold my couch and matching chair to two guys who looked about first-apartment age. They said they’d come by on Monday to pick it up. Bud took their number and that was the last I thought about it. I was mowing the yard today and looked up to see three bemused men looking at me. The look that says we seee youuu and you don’t see uuhhs yet. Flustered I turned off the mower, apologized for my little black ball of energy who was barking her ass off at them and opened the side door.

Once they left I finished the yard and then came in to the nastiness that is the space where a couch was. I swept up the dead, drying cricket and other miscellaneous stuff – noting, hey maybe I’m allergic to drying crickets and that’s why I can’t stop sneezing in this apartment. When I opened the glass door to dump the dirt and unfortunate cricket out, a gigantic fly came in – maybe he heard about my behind-the-couch burial area – and started buzzing around the living room. I re-opened the door and asked the fly to leave. Sadie ran out. I shooed her in and told the fly to go. She ran out again. Poor Sadie darted in and out, looking at me each time like I was manic and might need hospitalization in which case who would give her food laden in bacon grease or chicken fat? Since she's spent nearly a year and a half training me and isn't about to let some "episode" take her hard won work away. It occurred to me that probably the fly wasn’t listening and I could shoo him out without saying anything. Which I did. But I'm still nervous about, not so much the fact that I thought a fly could hear me, but that I thought it understood English.