Daniel Ball
When Tom’s father died they were given by default the near endless task of clearing all the shit from the house. The basement was full of old machine parts, tools and reloading dies, all soaked in thickened oils, variously packed into old peanut butter jars and stacked into decaying boxes from the ‘70s. His brother had fewer qualms about setting his share straight into the rented dumpster out front, displaying an immunity to either sentimentality or environmental concern that Tom admired. Only once the bulk of it had been hauled up the stairs did the desk come into view, an old walnut-stained roll-top. Together they took it out and wedged it into the folded-down seat of Tom’s Corolla, and when the rest of it was all done he drove it back across three states to his apartment.
He managed to walk it up the stairs himself, leaving chipped flats on the thin wooden feet. He squeaked it across the floor and through the door, and while it did not match the non-aesthetic of the apartment, he welcomed it for lack of furniture and set it in the corner with a stool. The roll-top let out a shrill note when he turned it down, and the scent of old guy stuff rose up from it.
Inside it were a dozen small square drawers, and inside the drawers was a massive assortment of threads and hooks, hackles and feathers, furs and yarns, and the vice and the fly-tying tools that he never learned how to use, nor had his father used himself since Tom was born. But he pulled up a YouTube playlist all the same and got started. What else, really, did he have to do?
It had to be eleven-something, dark. Tom twirled the whip-finisher and pulled the thread tight on his fifth elk hair caddis, then released it from the vice and set it next to the others. He ate the second half of his Nutri-grain bar and tossed the wrapper on the floor. When he adjusted his stool the leg bumped the desk and the hackles of the flies shook against one another. He’d never learned to fish, but there was something satisfying about lining them up. At a glance, they looked like real bugs, lifelike, though having never seen a live caddisfly he couldn’t be certain of the illusion’s veracity.
He moved on to tiny sedge flies, working chartreuse thread around fragmented pheasant feathers. A hook caught the inside of his thumb, and like a wasp’s sting it inflamed as a tiny droplet of venom squeezed through his capillaries. He kept on tying and kept on getting stung and by the time he felt he’d mastered the pattern he was inured to the effect of their stingers.
He tied through the night, working through pattern after pattern until the supply of hooks dwindled and the thread bobbins became thin. By dawn the drawers of materials were mostly cleared out, in their place a quivering assortment of varicolored flies. And as the first sunlight slid in through the dusty window, they chittered and buzzed and took wing.
The entire room glowed as flecks of fluorescent thread chased through the stale air. Steel hooks tinked as they alighted on mug handles, as rivals swiped for territory, as pairs courted and joined. Terrifying and beautiful, the swarm filled every space in the sparse apartment, flexing the feathers of long-dead birds and tasting the world with brittle hair antennae.
Tired, Tom looked on. Shooing the last of the flies from the desk, he closed the roll-top and watched as they spiraled up in flight, joining the others.
