Anna Maria Island

Did you know that the common housefly, like the one circling the room now in a wide, counter-clockwise circuit, hums in the key of F? It’s true. They come in different sizes, of course, but their bodies scale so that the vibrations of their wings correlate to the pitch intervals in F major: F, G, A, Bb, C, D, E. The octave above. Their wings are made for this. I didn’t know that back in 2015. There was so much I didn’t know. That summer, I didn’t know that you only had one year left to live. We stood beside each other in the tiny kitchen and prepared a dinner of rice and melted cheese, your favorite, as it reminded you of childhood, a rare pleasure from that time, and it helped ease the nausea from the row of pills you’d laid out on the table. We told each other that we were living with cancer. That this was possible. The monsoon rains poured from the sky as thunder rolled over the peninsula from the Gulf Coast to the Atlantic Seaboard. We’d rented a cottage on our favorite beach, with sliding-glass doors opening onto a sandy path that wound through […]