Now, I should clarify that my house isn't infested with flies. In fact, it's very rare that a fly would make it's way inside my house at any other time of the year. Personally, I think flies have a way of communicating with each other and they are constantly communicating with each other about my deadly ways towards them. "Hey, watch out for that guy. He's very skilled in killing flies for his pitcher plant."
The pattern seems to be during summer heat waves when nothing wants to be outdoors during the day, especially high noon. So what happens is these enormous horse–flies (Tabanidae) — which I just discovered that are known to bite. At least the females bite as they have a lust for blood — these insects find their way down vents on my rooftop and somehow enter the house from the attic. My attic is not large enough to be traipsing around in, but it's there for electrical piping, and whatever other reasons carpenters decide to build it.
When I came home from work that day, I didn't expect I would encounter 5 horse–flies as they came to my attention one at a time. After killing the first one, and another large horse–fly appears, that's when I begin to wonder whether this isn't natures way of getting retribution for all the fly killing I do in my life. The last one I killed is where I want to take this narrative.
It sits on one of the blades of a window screen. I was already exhausted from killing a few flies earlier in the week. It's exhausting work following it around, or scheming traps to coax it into a small room. I didn't want to damage the screen by flicking the t-shirt I was using that day for the previous flies I had found, so I used a technique that I hadn't used in awhile. All it took was raising the window screen so that the fly gets trapped in between the blades. While I'm doing this, I'm moving my hand in close proximity so that it might think to watch me instead of concerning itself with the slight vibration of the rising window screen. It doesn't get smashed the way a flyswatter might do, but it's trapped in between the blades and doesn't have the strength to squeeze itself out. The clean death is what I like about this method.
So I was thinking about the way I was waving my hand in front of it so as to get its attention… and it dawned on me that a newspaper in my hand might've been a good prop. Then I think of what the fly is seeing in its final seconds of liveliness. If I had a newspaper, it might've seen the headlines of the silliest presidential race of all time. And that's what I want to use in my screenplay.