Short #1 DISCOVERY

Usually once a week our housecat, Tomboy, would bring us corpses. Mice, moles, a few birds, an occasional squirrel, and even once a cicada that buzzed its wings in its final moments of life on our kitchen floor. The cat had two drop off locations for the catches. The preferred spot was behind the row of garbage and recycling cans in the garage. But if the garage door happened to be closed, the second choice was outside the sliding door leading from the kitchen to the deck.

Each location was equally disturbing.

A body in the garage would not be found immediately, giving ample time for a decomposing squirrel to add its odor to the stale, dusty garage air. We would argue fiercely over whose turn it was to bring out the garbage because no one wanted to be the discoverer.

A body on the deck was always in the open, never hidden behind a chair or in the shadows. It was always quickly disposed of but there was always the shock of seeing a mouse with X's in its eyes warming in the sun. And sometimes if you were not paying attention to where you were walking, you might, just like my mother did one day, step and slip on the squishy body of that mouse with the X's.

For a week she refused to feed the cat.

She argued every free moment," We should let it out in the woods to live with the rest of the wild animals."

My father countered in a low voice, one that sounded like a hostage negotiator speaking in a library, quiet, calming yet practical. He reserved this voice only for my mother when she was angry.
"It's instinct you can't blame it."

Talking my mother out of abandoning our cat in the woods turned out to be more significant than any of us could imagine. It indirectly provided for my father, who normally was an unexcitable man content with the sphere of his home and family, a brief period of minor fame and excited obsession.

As the dishwasher hummed, my mother sat in the kitchen talking to my aunt on the telephone, having her nightly glass of wine. My father was upstairs tuning his guitar. She moved her eyes toward the sound, smirked, and shook her head slightly. He'd had the guitar for more years than I could remember but never really learned to play beyond a few chords. He could easily play a few recognizable measures of a Angie or Bad Moon Rising but couldn't continue for the entire tune. He understood music well, he could explain chords and theory and the circle of fifths and a few other things that were always lost on us whenever we expressed interest in a lesson. But somehow he lacked the glue to piece it all together.

I could hear the plucking of strings and the bending of tones.

My father finished tuning and was sorting through his sheet music when a fly began circling his head. He swatted at it and continued looking through his folder. The fly made another pass. After it had swooped past his eyes another half dozen or so times my father stopped sorting his pages and stopped swatting. He stared ahead. He hummed. The fly hummed back. He hummed more. The fly hummed back, then flew away.

My father quickly grabbed a pencil, flipped over the music for The Thrill is Gone and began scribbling. Then he put down his pencil, abruptly got to his feet, and declared, with a confident honor, "A housefly buzzes in the key of F!"

My brother and sister didn't turn from their videogame. My mother used it as an excuse to get off the phone.

Disappointed by our response to his discovery, he repeated it louder. "Listen, I was just sitting here tuning my guitar, you guys heard me and I figured out that a fly buzzes in the key of F."

"Sweetheart, how can you know that?"

"Yeah, ok Dad."

"You'll see, I'm right, just wait."

He gave up on us and the awe he expected. Then he sat down at the computer and began typing furiously. My mother noticing two or three flies exploring the kitchen table in front of her, called up to him, "Chris go check the garage, I think Tomboy may have left us a present." He groaned and walked slowly towards the garage. He entered, the door slamming behind him. No one had paid any attention to how long he had been gone until my mother asked,

"Did your father go to bed?"

"I think he's still in the garage."

The four of us went to the door and with a little pushing, we all saw my father standing above the body of a dead blue jay, flies darting around his body. His eyes were closed and he was humming.

It took months of sending letters and making phone calls to different professional organizations and college departments and "bug people" until someone decided to look into his claim. It turned out to be true. An experiment was conducted. Who knows where the funding came from, but one summer day a scientific journal arrived in the mail. It was glossy, had a picture of a dragonfly on the front cover framed on all sides by an inch of white. My father's discovery was outlined in a three sentence blurb in a section entitled Short List. His name was printed as well as the scientific method used to conduct the experiment which I did not understand then nor can I recall now.

My father called the publisher and ordered 10 copies. One for each of us and a few extras for himself.

Within a day, an old fly swatter that had hung on the frame of the garage door disappeared. And even now when most people would swat and complain as a housefly circles their head, my father closes his eyes and hums, a smile reaching across his face.