Black Flies

“Ambros, you’re holding back.” He hadn’t spoken since giving me the painting this morning, taking it from the same bag he’d brought lunch in yesterday. It seemed like he’d planned on giving it to me yesterday, but had gotten sidetracked.

He’d gone surfing this morning, a black figure in the blue. Medium blue fog, light blue sky, dark blue waves, tinted brown. First time in almost eight months, or something like that. The calendar was in the kitchen was a few years old, after all. To be honest, I’d even lost track of the days of the week.

The Gulf waters didn’t tend to get that cold, but could chill up in the winter. So it hadn’t come as a surprise to see Ambrosio trudging out of the water a couple hours after sunrise clad in that sleek black wetsuit that I thought he’d buried somewhere, I hadn’t seen it in so long. Rivulets of seafoam glided around his knees as he slogged forward, against the current, blue surfboard in arm. When he’d reached the beach, he lodged the board in the dry sand and paused to wring out his shoulder-length hair, hair that was permanently tangled these days (“Run a comb through it,” I’d suggested one day; “That isn’t how wavy hair tends to work,” he’d replied).

From the deck, I’d stared. But if he’d felt my gaze—and he usually did, somehow—he hadn’t shown it. He’d leaned against the board for a few minutes, watching the waves, every faucet and angle of his lithe form accentuated by that damn wetsuit, looking all the more angelic in that dim morning light. When he’d finally come back to the house to rinse off with a small ration of desalinated water, he’d shouldered past me, nodding and shaking his head to himself, not inviting me into the conversation.

The sky had not turned flush this morning, instead moving from the deep midnight blue to a powdery cobalt to the dead steel of late morning.

And in that late morning, I sat across from Ambrosio and said his name again, his full name. “Ambrosio.”

He didn’t look at me until I leaned forward and rested my hand on his.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“W…” His voice hoarse, he cleared his throat and started again. “What?”

I gestured to the painting, what was once a random piece of cardboard. He’d painted an idealized portrait of me for me, startlingly detailed around the eyes and dissolving to vague brushstrokes around the hair and chin. The blue of the eyes—my eyes, in Ambrosio’s mindspace—was more vibrant than it really was, and I wondered how he’d managed that with just a spot of blue paint left, almost all spent back when he used to sit out and paint the ocean.

The look in the portrait’s eyes was softer than I’d ever seen in the mirror.

Ambrosio nodded, drew in a breath. No candles were lit, leaving the room comfortable on any other day but somber on that particular morning.

“Ambros.” I repeated, kneading my thumb in his palm. He gently withdrew his hand, leaving me stretched over the table, reaching for nothing.

“I...don’t think that you have been...honest with me,” Ambrosio finally replied, choosing his words carefully. I felt him drifting as he stared at the window. I hated that. He was a child of the ocean, yes, and his mind was a sea.

“Honest? Is this…about yesterday?”

He looked me in the eye, then, rubbing his hand as if he’d been injured. “You lied.”

“Lied?” I repeated.

“The generator. It had been there for a while.”

I was incredulous. “The generator? That’s what this is about?”

“You said….that you found the room. But the generator was rusted all over the floor.”

“Ambros. You’re smarter than that. The generator was there, in the room, when I found it.”

He shook his head. “But the flies. How—where did you find them? I always thought that you went back to the old school for some nostalgic reason, but when I saw you, you were—”

“Cleaning. I was cleaning. I found the flies in an old freezer unit and I was going to burn the box. If—if the pandemic really originated there, then don’t you think that it would still have some contaminants left? Contaminants that could leach into the water or get loose? I was cleaning, Ambros.”

His voice was soft. “I don’t believe you.”

“Then what would make you believe me?”

“The way you acted. It was…”

“You had never come to visit me before. And—and wouldn’t you be surprised if you found proof of your greatest nightmare in a freezer of your old workplace? I found some of the papers in a drawer in the office of one of the researchers, a tenured professor. It confirmed everything I’d thought.”

Ambrosio slowly nodded, brow still furrowed. Outside, a gull cried. I could see the sandpipers all lined up on the beach again, their needle-like beaks bobbing up and down as they hunted for food.

“I’m done there, if that makes you happy,” I added.

“Done?”

“Finished. I was going to burn the box of flies. That’s all.”

There was another pause. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“About what?”

“All of it. I wondered, too. Matthew, I’m a poet. A romantic fool, fine. But I’m not an idiot. What did you used to do at the university? And what motivation could anyone possibly have to create such a—a thing,” he finished, uncharacteristically ineloquent.

“Research. I was—”

“A biologist.”

I hesitated, and he caught it. But the truth is, I didn’t know what he was looking for. “As for the motive…it wasn’t war, and it wasn’t an accident.”

“But what?”

“Does it matter,” I said, echoing his words, taking his hand again, “when the Rapture has already come and gone?”

He let out a breath as if his head just broke the surface of some dark pool. “It’s done, isn’t it?”

“There’s no more. It’s done. We can forget this. I’ll burn the flies, and we’ll live as if the end never came.” I released his hand and stood, walking into the kitchen and retrieving a flask of wine that we kept for special occasions. I set it in front of Ambrosio, a peace offering. After a moment’s hesitation, he took it, draining the flask in one swig.

When I took his hand again, it was warm.

Can all souls be saved?

The vodka went next. It was flavorless and odorless, so that when we kissed, all that I could taste was the velvety charcoal of the wine, which was forever gone from our world as we knew it. French doors out the corners of my eyes, the ocean singing through the window above our heads, no wonder Ambrosio was so obsessed with it—

He pulled back. “Matthew—”

“Ambrosio.” I shifted to fill the space he left, stroking his cheek. “We have all the time in the world. Remember?”

His dark eyes were caught in some depth that I couldn’t reach, but he relaxed again, allowing me to draw him forward.

Ambrosio, tell me, can all souls be saved?