Gift of the Brabblefly

By Phillip Barcio

Eddie walked to the edge of town, where the brabbles grow, before the others were awake. He brought a cup of hot coffee from home (single origin, direct trade, organic, light roast) in a cup he stole from Eddie #2, and a paczki filled with the dreams of a huckleberry plant. His plan was to eat the paczki in the brabble field, to dip it in the piping hot beverage he had brought so the sensual liquid soaked through to the huckleberry dreams inside, releasing their silky aroma of lovers’ regrets.

“Take small bites, Eddie,” he reminded himself, like he had learned in paczki-eating class. “Let the sweet dough disintegrate between the roof of your mouth and your tongue, eyes closed, as the brabbleflies awake, the aria of their morning light surrounding you, filling your heart with the sense of wonder you have lost.”

To where did the belief that he could do anything he wanted disappear?

He wore his black jeans, the ones he got from Crossroads with the ostentatious rips in the fabric covering the back pockets and the heavy brass buttons engraved with the faces of tigers. Black jeans have been proven, for reasons not fully explored, to resist puncture from brabbles. He paired the black jeans with a yellow shirt, the color of the fourteenth chakra, the elbow chakra, storehouse of joy and belief in magic, and a colour well documented to attract the brabbleflies’ fickle affection. He was bootless of course, and hatless, also gloveless. Bare hands, bare head, bare feet: a man of peace.

The trip to the edge of town seemed longer than the last time he had made it, and Eddie wondered if he might be shrinking. Impatience got the best of him and he ate the paczki on the way, right out of the bag. He did not dip it in his coffee, he did not savour it, he did not let it melt in his mouth, did not close his eyes. He just devoured it, a half hour’s worth of excitement packed into thirty seconds.

Then he tripped on a bottle cap and spilled his coffee on his bare feet. He screamed out an angry cuss. It hovered in the air before him, taking the shape of a blue manta ray, then flung itself at Eddie, affixing itself to his face. Eddie dropped to his knees, suffocating, knowing there was no way to force the thing loose. He mumbled the Daggum-vidha three times until the cuss loosened its grip. It floated off of Eddie’s face and stared back at him angrily.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie said. The cuss became translucent and waved its wings gently at Eddie. Eddie projected kind thoughts and soft whisperings of earnest wishes toward the creature until finally it fluttered away, back whence it came, the realm of broken promises and forgotten dreams.

Eddie composed himself. He closed his eyes and breathed. He focused on his breath. He relaxed. He felt nothing. Then he opened his eyes and hovering in the air before him was a yellow light, a lone brabblefly, a tiny, endless, blazing supernova of love heat, a world within a world.

Eddie smiled at the brabblefly. The brabblefly expanded a hundred times into a glowing, swirling cosmos of fire, a white hole. It pulled Eddie into the light. He soared deep within the chasm and there, among the secrets of heaven, he came face to face with his deepest desires. They were three and they spoke to him. They said, “We are your deepest desires, Eddie #1. We are failure, acceptance of failure, and a desire to be free.”

Eddie reached out to his desires but they disintegrated. The brabblefly alone was before him. “Thank you,” Eddie said.

The brabblefly handed Eddie a tiny note, which he could not read because it was too small and because he never learned to decipher the written symbols of the brabble world because he was always too busy in school eating paczkis and drinking coffee. But the moment Eddie touched the note, he understood. Its meaning washed over him. It flowed through his aortic cavern, into his veins, filling his inner self with some doom-lifting, cloud bursting, alien emotion he had never felt before, but that he later described to Eddie #2, Eddie #3, Alexandre and the Statue Man, for the purpose of explaining why he no longer wished to commit crimes with them, as, “A tingle — a gentle, humming, ecstatic vibration from extremity to extremity that made me feel temporarily as if the world was not completely full of shit.”

This story originally appeared in Space Squid, an award-winning sci-fi and humour magazine based in Austin, Texas.

https://www.spacesquid.com/free-scifi/gift-of-the-brabblefly/

About the Author

Phillip Barcio is an award winning author, journalist, radio host, cocktail aficionado, Neapolitan pizza expert, hyper-competitive amateur bowler, social media skeptic, degrowth proponent, animal protector and enthusiastic advocate for bucket hats.

His story The Vacantlands won Boulevard Magazine's Non-Fiction Award for Emerging Writers, and is in the current print issue of the journal.

His work has also been featured in Western Humanities Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Space Squid, Swamp Ape Review, Tikkun, Hyperallergic, Grey Sparrow Journal, The Big Windows Review and dozens of other fine publications. He has created several radio shows for WQRT, an experimental art, music, and community radio project by Big Car Collaborative, including the pandemic-inspired series Apocalypse Mixtape, and the artist interview series Art Racket.

He earned a degree in filmmaking from Vancouver Film School, degrees in photojournalism and theater from Ball State University and a 2nd degree black belt from a little karate school in Indianapolis.

Phillip lives in an old house in Muncie, Indiana, with a garage dojo and a vegetable garden where he and the neighbours get together to chat and let their dogs rub noses.