What Happened After I Killed the Fly

Quiet garden space in soft summer light, evoking stillness and reflection

I was about eight years old when I was told to kill a fly.

I remember hesitating, holding the spray, knowing what I was meant to do and not understanding why it felt so wrong.

Eventually, I did it.

I sprayed the fly.

And the moment it stopped moving, something in me dropped.

Not guilt in the way you’re told to feel guilty.
Something quieter, but heavier than that.

It didn’t feel small.

It didn’t feel like “just a fly.”

It felt like I had gone against something in myself.

I couldn’t leave it there.

I couldn’t pretend it didn’t matter.

Matchbox on the grass

So I picked it up carefully, wrapped it in tissue, and put it in a matchbox.

I took it out into the garden and buried it.

I made a small cross out of two sticks and tied them together with cotton.

I remember pressing it into the ground and standing there, not really knowing what I was doing, only that it felt necessary.

Like something needed to be put back into place.

My parents thought it was funny.

To them, it was a child overreacting to something insignificant.

But it never felt insignificant to me.

Not then. Not now.

Looking back, I can see what I couldn’t name at the time.

It wasn’t about the fly.

It was about the fact that I couldn’t ignore what I felt.

Even when I was told to.

Even when it would have been easier to.

That hasn’t changed.

It’s the same instinct that runs through my work now.

The same refusal to treat animals as background, or lesser, or incidental.

The same need to recognise something that exists, whether it’s acknowledged or not.

In my paintings, animals are not placed into a scene.

They are present.

And the connection between us is not something imagined.

It is something recognised.

If this feels familiar to you, then you already know….

some things are never small, no matter how they appear.

View the paintings in the God’s Rope series

Before Words - Oil painting of a quiet connection between human and animal, expressing trust and presence