Slipping the Fly


“I can read, you know,” she says, as I name items on the menu out loud. “How about you whistle down one of the waiters. Please?”

I tell her it’s bad manners to whistle in public. Either way, I’ve got a method.

“You just look sad,” she says.

“That’s my method,” I say. 

Lately, I’d been struggling to make choices. Everything’d lost its hem with me, and I couldn’t hold shit in hand. Like earlier, when we left the apartment for dinner, I couldn’t choose between the red and the blue tie. I looked at them, saw the difference, couldn’t choose. She told me it didn’t matter. I misheard her and thought she said I didn’t matter. I stopped cold and said her opinion mattered a lot to me. She sucked an electronic cigarette and told me to choose a tie. I never even put one on.

Reeling in a waiter follows a similar plot. A half dozen buzz around, but I can’t pull a single one. Meanwhile, she’s tearing the bread into little pieces and making the table a graveyard of loaf. She’s nervous. Makes sense. Me too. I’ve got the nerves up in my mouth like another tongue.

Time flits by. She clicks her tongue.

“I fished with poor bait,” I say.

She puts her elbows on the table. “You lured me in, though.”

I don’t prod, fearing the answer. I take the remaining bread in my hands. “I think it’s stale,” I say, popping a piece in my mouth.

“Then why are you eating it?” she says.

“I don’t know.”

It’s the first honest thing I’ve said all night.

I excuse myself to the bathroom.

She taps her wrist, where a watch might be. “The show’s about to begin. Don’t be late.”

Ours is a simple grift. Easy to follow, easy to execute. Great reward. Here’s how it works: You go to a restaurant. You be polite. You be likable. You learn the waiter’s name. You order a lot. When food comes, make a joke. Ideally, one that’ll stick in mind. You’ll be joining us for all this, right? Oh dear Lord what have we done!

Then, in a lull, you knock something off the table. Water glass, breadbasket, decorative carnation centerpiece, whatever. And when the waiter’s bent down minding the mess: bam. You slip the fly.

It’s called a fly but it doesn’t have to be a fly. It’s hard to find flies. We usually use crickets, the type you can buy at a pet store. Soup makes a nice target. Curries, phở, risotto, too. What really matters is you slip fly subtly. And that you don’t forget to keep the ball bouncing. The grift hinges on what comes next.

After your fly’s been slipped, you pause. Pretend. Play dead. And then, after some time, when you’ve come close to buying your own lie? You scream. She’s our screamer. She’s so good sometimes I forget it’s a show. Award winning, even. Forty-seven times and counting.

They often give us champagne on the house for our trouble. Sometimes a dessert I can’t pronounce. At the end, when the check comes back blank, we smile and promise to come back. Of course, we never do.

As I walk to the bathroom, I pass a waiter. I think I’m headed the right way already but I ask him for directions. He points behind me, lifting his arm. The white cloth resting on his wrist remains still, as if permanently attached. He wears perfectly symmetrical facial hair and a cologne you can’t rub from a magazine. I tug a wedgie forming in the seat of my pants. “Thank you very much,” I say, hitting every letter. 

In the bathroom I stand at the urinal waiting for something to happen. The bathroom is walled with white and black ceramic tiles, hardly a crack in the space between. I run my fingers against the wall to find the crease, but it’s smooth, not a flaw in sight.

I can’t pee. I zip up and wash my hands. There’s an air dryer and a paper towel dispenser on the wall next to each other. I imagine leaving the bathroom to find a guy with a clipboard and glasses asking me why I went with the air dryer first instead of the other way around. I think about my answer, turn off the faucet, and return to our table with wet hands. 

Our grift is fun, but there are rules. At first, I didn’t want rules, though by now I can see their merit. You only hit nice places. Dress like you’d never accept a freebie. When the restaurant manager comes out and apologizes and offers the meal on the house, you have to reject it at first. Oh, we couldn’t. You’re just simply too kind. Convincing someone you don’t want something is a great way to get it. She taught me that.

“I ordered,” she says, as I sit back down. “Are you ready?”

I salute. She looks off and scans the room. Her eyes are deep brown. But at an angle, and when the light hits correctly, you can catch a little green in them, like a glimmer on a crystal. I love her.

We wait. We’re good at waiting. How you wait is key. You can’t look anxious or excited. You have to look natural. Peaceful. Calm. Cats in the sun. These moments are my favorite, when you’re sitting on a bomb that only you know is a bomb. The first couple times we slipped fly, I had to massage my cheeks for hours after on account of how tightly my mouth fixed a smile.

I can’t remember how we started exactly. She says it was my idea and she’s been saying it so long I suppose it’s true now. It’s funny, because when we first got to planning, all I can remember is her voice talking out the mechanics. Either way, once we started, we never stopped. We ripped four restaurants a week. Sometimes five, plus an ice cream shop for dessert. Soon, I left a duffel bag in her closet. I stopped paying my own rent. First as a necessity. Then as a choice. Eventually, I moved in. A year passed. We bought a couch with all the money we didn’t spend on food. We thought about getting a dog, maybe.

Eventually, though, we got accustomed. Of the show, of each other. When you get accustomed, you get lazy. And laziness leads to mistakes. We had a few close calls. An accusation or two. That turned a key. We’d always freestyled at the restaurants, but after one near miss she appealed for a scripted approach. I obliged, learned my lines, stayed on my side of the bed. It was effective. It was okay.

She kicks me under our table. My mind had wandered so far I didn’t even notice that the waiter’d come and gone. I’d missed my cue. Now, we sat at a table full to the corners of very large white plates with small, neat piles of food on them. No fly yet.

I look for my flies. I send a hand into my inside jacket pocket. Then the other. 

“What the hell are you doing,” she says, hardly moving her lips.

I search my pants, front and back. The pocket of my starchy button-up shirt. The dirty area between my phone and its case. I feel like cursing. “Fuck,” I say. 

The second honest thing I’ve said all night.

The waiter comes over. He asks if there’s a problem.

“Thanks for the bathroom help earlier,” I say. 

He looks like he wants to spit in my eye but can’t because he has rent. I try to return a look that says, I know exactly how you feel, but she kicks me under the table again.

I need it. I’m way out. Harness loose, tether cut, skating on the periphery. In such a position, you’d think it wise to take a moment to recalibrate. Buy yourself some time. Get prudent. Thing is, that’s not realistic. When the wheels come off, you can only crash.

“There’s a fly in my food,” I say. 

I can feel her glare from across the table like a slap on a sunburn. 

The waiter cocks his head to the side. I can tell he’s taking stock of all my faults. The way my eyes cross at certain angles. The dry skin on my chin. My deep widows peak.

He smiles, no teeth. He mentions a manager and disappears.

I look at her but her eyes are in her lap. I try to remember my prayers.

The manager’s not messing. He wears a boxy, short-sleeve, button-up shirt, and I see dozens of little pink-and-white oil burn scars on his forearms. He has a tattoo of a fork on one side of his thick neck. A tattoo of a knife on the other. Crew cut. Generous belly. Vascular hands. A total industry professional. We’re got.

“I understand there’s a problem?” the manager says, cracking his knuckles.

I wait for her to speak but she doesn’t. I look at her. But she’s already gone.

“There’s a fly in my food,” I say.

The manager smiles with all his teeth. “Interesting,” he says. “I heard you two were clever.”

Things going well don’t go well forever.

Yada, yada, yada.

After security sees us out, we walk all the way home, letting the world go blue. We don’t speak. The silence becomes a thing around us. A web of gauze. My eyes fog. My vision blurs. I want her to yell at me. To cuss me out. To call me names. She doesn’t. She just walks a few steps ahead of me. I hold one hand with the other to remind myself I’m there.

When we get home, she goes to the bathroom and locks the door. In the bedroom, I find the box of crickets I’d forgotten. The red and the blue ties I never put on are curled near it, like leftover cricket skin.

A cricket’s exoskeleton isn’t meant to last. Eight to ten new skins in a lifetime. Each time is a struggle. The crickets shake like mad going from one skin to the next. Some shake more. Some take longer. They all seem to hate it, though. Change hurts, I figure.

She and I’d been in the habit of taking turns tossing the molted skins but at some point, I got sad about it. Now, she does it alone. By hand and quickly. Sometimes she accidentally takes a cricket mid-molt with her to the trash and throws it out alive.

“Hey,” I call out, still sitting on the ground.

The bathroom door opens and closes. She takes a half step into the bedroom. “I’m going to leave,” she says, one hand on the knob.

I think about replying.

“We could try and talk,” she says.

“I don’t know,” I say.

The third honest thing.

She rubs her temples. “That’s what happens with boys,” she says. “You answer every question and they don’t even ask any.”

I close my eyes and tilt my head back. The front door opens. The front door closes. In the box, the crickets are hysterical, stomping all over each other and their leftover molted skins. I watch them. Violent and lost. Frustrated and indecisive. Going this way and that way and back again. I undo the clasp at the top of the box. I put my hand inside. I leave it there. They crawl all over it. 


Andres Luís Vaamonde graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor of arts in English in 2018. He was born and raised in New York City, where he works as a literary book scout. He was named a Finalist in Ember Chasm Review’s Novel Contest (2020) and a Finalist for the Marianne Russo Award for Emerging Writers (2020). He is the forthcoming Spring 2022 Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University.