Scraper of the Flies

One of the many occupational hazards of working in a used bookstore is the possibility of touching books which are utterly disgusting. Books that are molding; books that are speckled with mud; books that shower your shoes with dirt when you shake them. I have seen books stained with blood, both dried and fresh, and I'm pretty sure I once smelled cat pee while flipping through the suspiciously yellow pages of a Danielle Steel novel.

All these things are pretty repulsive. The fresh blood in particular. It got on my shirt - a shirt I no longer own - and on my hands, which I must have washed fifty times that day. For a week I agonized: What if I get hepatitis? Did I have any open cuts where it touched me? Did I put my hands near my mouth? Am I going to die?

Eventually, yes, I learned to live again. But it was a long, hard battle - one I wouldn't wish on anyone. (Except that one chick. God, she sucks.)

So anyway. Today I got a box of books, right? They were old and dusty, but that's par for the course 'round these parts. The woman who brought them in apologized for the dust ("sorry, they've just been sitting in my garage so long"), and I assured her it was no problem to clean them. I started going through the box, wiping each book down with a paper towel soaked in Windex as I went - but then, as I neared the bottom, there appeared a colony of flies.

They were repulsive, these flies. Some had been crushed beneath the weight of the books and become two-dimensional, while others had fallen in the gaps between the books and had actually expanded, their puffy bodies rolling back and forth like marbles over the dirty cardboard.

I turned the book I was holding over in my hand, and found about five or six flies stuck to the back cover. They were so flat they were starting to become one with the jacket: their wings were tissue-thin, and their heads looked like ink blotches.

"Um." I paused, unsure of how to proceed. "Huh. It appears that these ones are a bit...damaged."

"Well, but you can just wipe that stuff off, right?" she asked.

Oh, of course. Of course I can "wipe that off." I mean, how are mashed-up flies any different from a bit of water? You just grab a towel, and...well, no. When they're all mashed up like that, you usually have to scrape them. So you grab a chisel - you know, that chisel you keep on your person at all times - and you...oh, wait. THAT'S REALLY GROSS.

But I didn't know how to say that in a professional manner, and anyway I didn't feel like arguing with her, so I shrugged, grabbed a Kleenex, and used it to pick off one of the flies. I managed to rip the body loose, but the wings remained; they glowed green and pink, like the wall of a bubble caught in the sunlight. I stood there for a moment, pressing my thumb and forefinger against the lump embedded in the Kleenex, and then I took a deep breath, looked at her, and said:

"Of course."

Thereby cementing my status as the patron saint of retail.