This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/ZH0901 on 2026-08-06 21:00:20+00:00.

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The flies arrived during the hottest week of July.

At first, everyone complained. They filled kitchens and cafes, crawled across fruit displays and gathered inside bus shelters where the glass trapped the heat. Supermarkets sold out of bug spray within two days. My local supermarket put handwritten signs above the empty shelves limiting customers to two cans each, although there was nothing left to limit.

I found three flies in my bedroom on the first night. One circled the light bulb while the others knocked themselves against the window, their bodies making small taps against the glass.

I killed them all before I went to sleep. By morning, there were six more.

Nobody knew where they were coming from. The news blamed the heat and the overflowing bins caused by delayed collections, but that didn’t explain why they were appearing in clean homes and offices. People posted photos of them clustered around plug sockets and smoke alarms. One woman filmed them pushing through the gaps around her bathroom extractor fan.

For a while, it was all anyone spoke about. Then people stopped complaining.

I first noticed it at work. A fly landed on the edge of Amelia’s coffee cup while she was serving a customer. It walked slowly around the rim, rubbing its front legs together. Amelia glanced at it and carried on talking. I waited for her to brush it away.

Instead, she lifted the cup and drank.

The fly moved under her nose as she tipped the cup towards her mouth. Its wings trembled in the steam. She swallowed, lowered the cup and smiled at the customer without acknowledging it.

“You’ve got a fly on there,” I said once the customer had left.

Amelia looked down. “Oh.”

She held her finger beside the rim. The fly stepped onto it almost immediately.

For some reason, that unsettled me more than if she had simply ignored it.

Flies didn’t behave like that. They darted away when you reached for them. They battered themselves against windows rather than use the open one beside them. They did not calmly climb onto a fingertip.

Amelia lifted it closer to her face. Its wings fluttered against her skin.

“Be careful,” she said.

I thought she was talking to me. Then she carried it to the front of the shop and released it through the door.

When she returned, I was still staring at her.

“What?” she asked.

“You drank while it was on your cup.”

She shrugged. “It was only resting.”

That became the phrase people used.

Only resting.

They said it when flies landed on food or crawled across their arms. They said it when they found one sitting in their baby’s hair or walking over the exposed surface of a cut. If someone flinched, another person would smile and tell them not to worry.

It was only resting.

A week earlier, I had watched Amelia chase one around the stockroom with a rolled up magazine until she nearly knocked over a display stand. Now she spoke about them with the patience people usually reserved for frightened animals.

I asked whether she had stopped using bug spray. Her expression changed. It was slight, just a twitch at the corners of her mouth, as though I had said something unnecessarily cruel. She said the flies weren’t hurting anyone.

“They spread disease,” I told her.

“Do they?”

I laughed because I thought she was joking.

She didn’t laugh with me.

Over the next few days, I noticed fewer people brushing them away. A man at the cafe near work let one crawl across the lid of his coffee while he drank through the opening. When it reached his mouth, he paused until it moved, then carried on.

Soon, videos began appearing online.

People filmed themselves holding out their hands and waiting for flies to land. Parents encouraged their children to let them crawl across their knuckles. One woman sat completely still while dozens covered her cheeks and forehead, disappearing into her hair.

The video had nearly two million likes. I watched it twice, trying to understand why nobody in the comments seemed disgusted.

They called it beautiful. They said she had been chosen.

At first, I assumed that was just another word people had started using online. Something meaningless that would disappear within a week.

Then my roommate used it.

I came home one evening and found Samira sitting at the kitchen table with her hands folded in her lap. The windows were closed despite the heat. Sweat had darkened the collar of her shirt, and the kitchen smelled of overripe bananas and warm rubbish.

A fly sat between her eyebrows. It was larger than the ones I had seen outside. Its body was a deep, inky black, and short hairs were visible along its back.

“Why are the windows shut?” I asked.

“I didn’t want it to leave.”

I dropped my bag by the door. “What?”

Samira smiled without moving her head.

“It chose me.”

I watched the fly crawl down the bridge of her nose, pause beside her nostril and lower its head.

“Get that off your face.”

Samira told me to stop being dramatic. The fly had reached the edge of her nostril, one leg lifting each time she breathed.

I grabbed a tea towel from the counter and flicked it towards her. She screamed and covered her face, knocking the chair backwards as she stood. The fly shot towards the ceiling.

Samira rarely raised her voice, even when she was angry, but now she shouted at me like I had done something unforgivable.

“You could have killed it!”

“That was the idea.”

The fly circled above us, its buzzing filling the kitchen. Each time it passed over the light, its shadow flickered across her face.

“It’s mine,” she said.

I left before the argument became worse.

That night, I woke to buzzing beside my ear. I slapped the side of my face and sat up, tangled in the duvet. The room was dark apart from the orange glow coming through the curtains.

The buzzing stopped.

I switched on my bedside lamp. A fly sat on the wall beside my pillow. The skin beside my ear prickled where it had been, and I rubbed at it hard with my palm before reaching for the book on my bedside table and smacking it.

Its body burst with a soft crack. When I pulled the book away, one wing was stuck to the wall. The rest slid down in a dark smear.

I wiped it from the wall with a tissue, dropped it into the bathroom bin and went back to bed.

In the morning, Samira was standing in my doorway with the crumpled tissue from the bin pinched between two fingers. A black leg had pushed through the paper.

“What did you do?” she asked, distraught.

I told her that the fly was in my room. Her eyes filled with tears. Without another word, she carried the tissue into the kitchen and unfolded it on the table.

The fly’s body was flattened. Its abdomen was split, releasing a thin yellow fluid that soaked into the paper.

Samira touched one of its legs with the tip of her finger.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

My stomach tightened.

“I’m sorry she did that.”

The apartment became difficult to live in after that. Samira stopped taking the bins out because flies gathered around them. She left plates of fruit on the counter until they moulded and leaked into the bowls. The air grew sweet and rotten. Tiny white larvae appeared around the edges of the sink. When I tried to clean them away, she blocked me.

“They’re not ready.”

“For what?”

She stared at the writhing cluster. “I don’t know.”

Flies followed her from room to room. Not hundreds. Never enough to look like an infestation. Usually, there was only one.

That was what I began noticing everywhere.

One fly per person. One rested on the shoulder of the bus driver. Another crawled across a woman’s handbag on the train. A child in a pushchair had one nestled in the soft crease beneath his chin while his mother watched it with quiet affection.

Nobody swatted them away.

The flies weren’t random. I became certain of that. They didn’t move between people or circle the room searching for food. Each one remained close to a particular person, landing on their clothes, their hair or the exposed skin of their faces.

Some people spoke to them.

Amelia kept hers on the counter at work. It waited beside the card machine while she served customers, occasionally lifting its wings. She had started bringing small pieces of food for it in a bottle cap.

I pointed out that flies only lived for a few weeks.

Amelia looked genuinely confused. Her gaze moved to the one beside the cash desk.

“That isn’t true.”

“It is.”

She smiled. “Not these.”

I stopped going into the staffroom at lunch. Flies gathered around the people eating there, stepping across forks and resting on open lips between bites. Nobody seemed to mind when they touched the food.

By the end of the week, the nets had disappeared from the pastry displays in the cafes near work. The bakery across the street removed theirs after customers complained that they made the flies seem unwelcome. Now, flies were crawling over the iced buns and settling between the layers of croissants while people queued without reacting.

The news changed too. Reports about infestation levels disappeared. Pest control adverts were removed. A scientist who had warned about contamination issued an apology, saying his earlier comments were based on outdated information.

Councils asked residents not to use chemical sprays.

A man was arrested after someone filmed him setting fire to a cluster of flies on a bin. The video showed people dragging him away while others knelt around the burnt insects.

Their crying was louder than his shouting.

I start...

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