I noticed a fly on my mirror while I was shaving. I thought about that fly while I was shaving. I wondered what the fly’s sense of me was, in whatever sense a fly has a “sense” of non-fly beings. If it was aware of me, it certainly wasn’t in abject fear of what I might do to it. I’d say it was a pretty laidback fly. What’s a fly’s sense of people in general, I wondered, because flies surely don’t think of people as individuals, or do they? And what kind of distinction would it make between me and a rat? Are we both merely not-fly?

I’m sure a fly doesn’t have the same exalted opinion of humans as we do about ourselves, nor does a fly know about our changing hierarchies of living things. A fly doesn’t know that some of us think humans are the highest form of life, the bees knees of life on earth, as it were. Others would say that all species are adapted to be good at whatever it is that evolution has equipped them to do to survive and carry on their mission, however you care to define “mission,” whether from a religious perspective or from a purely scientific one, agnostic about purpose, in which any hierarchy is the height of human hubris. The fly doesn’t think about any of this as it stands on the mirror, just hanging out.

After I finished shaving and rinsed my face, I wondered if I should try to smash the fly to death against the mirror, but the better angel of my nature gave a simple wave to shoo the fly away.