By: Michael Zivick
I cry ninety-six tears from ninety-six eyes.
-The Cramps
Do you know how long fruit fly sex lasts? About as long as it is taking you to read this sentence. By the time you can say, “Bug fuck,” three times, the fruit fly will already be stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray on the bed stand. I would hate to be a fruit fly. Nevertheless, fruit fly sex is, on some levels, the greatest sex of my life.
People on the stainless end of genetic research may see fruit fly studies as the field’s two-day old rind. But, as it says on the black and white poster over my workstation, If You Have To Fake Meiosis, Maybe You’re Not Doing It Right. I can’t speak for every laboratory breeding program, but where I work something special is in the air. Call it romance, cutting through the blended metallic aromas of various solvents. Mass insemination creates a powerful aura, a field… a web. A delicious trap, the enchantment is hard to escape. I failed. I succumbed to the allure of assignation created by my fruit flies and joined them. Only the meiosis was missing, blocked.
I’m in a relationship with a woman who’s also employed at the lab. We don’t actually work together—her lab is downstairs, first basement level. She does movement studies, with fruit flies on tiny tethers in wind cones.
(Navigation… no secret that’s of interest to the folks from the five-sided ring—The Service Industry, we call them.)
One evening, after everyone but the flies had left the lab for home, she and I violated more than each other. As we ground our flesh against stainless steel countertops, broke beakers and tubes and dishes, spilled jars of molasses and cornmeal medium and knocked gas taps open, practically the entire clean-room rule book was out the window, as if on transparent wings.
We’ve never repeated our performance, but in the car on the way home I drove and said, “I wonder how often that happens there.”
“It’s on the rise, I’d guess. I mean, look how sexy the coveralls have gotten—close fitting, angelic white, side zippers from hood to thigh…”
Jess pulled a multifilament copolymer sleeve from the gym bag on the floorboard between her feet. Its end disappeared beneath her short skirt. With her left hand tight on my right thigh and her nose aimed at the close ceiling, she continued through clenched teeth and eyes.
“Bee-fucking-you-tiffle.” Her left hand moved leftward, my foot grew heavy and we nearly collided with a semi. She groaned and snorted as I struggled with the car’s directional and velocity controls. After a few more close ones she relaxed her grip. Out from between her legs, under her skirt, came the garment. Prior to its adventure it had a Surface Resistivity Factor of 30 micro ohms. Even as Jess rubbed it all over my face, causing the closest call yet, I couldn’t say if it was now off by a few micro ohms one way or another.
“Why are you driving like such a pussy? Can’t you tell I’m in a hurry to get home?”
“Will you put on the High Density Taffeta?” I panted.
“One-point-five-six C.F.M. air porosity?” she teased.
“Yes,” I drooled.
“100% Spray Rating?” she purred.
“Yes, yes…” I moaned.
“Is that the High Density Taffeta you want, my big strong extruded fiber?” She licked pouting lips.
“Yes, yes, yes!” I sang out, pumping my hips in my seat.
We laughed like nerds at how sexy stupid could be, even feigned idiocy, and I proceeded to break the speed limit.
“But if you really want to know how often non-fly fucking occurs in the lab, ask Joe.”
No shit. Joe. Behind the sliding window just inside the main entrance Joe, finger on the door buzzer Joe, but only if your ID is visible Joe, Don’t matter how many times I’ve seen you… today Joe, Rules are rules now Joe. A half-dozen nine-inch black and white (gray and grayer, really) security monitors at his elbows sequence through every room in the building. No shit. I hadn’t thought a thing about them. But Jess knew.
“Oh come on.” Her smile and her eyes reflected the sort of genuine surprise that made my own easier to swallow. “I thought for sure you could see me.”
“What?”
“When you had me bent over the tray cart? And I wheeled it around to face a different direction? Rex, I was positioning us for the camera… didn’t you see our reflection in the sample-storage door?”
“Uh.” I had a lot of swallowing to do. But Jess was so tickled, she might have been sitting on a cuff link, and I could do little but grin wider and drive faster.
“I was mouthing to the camera as you drove me from behind, ‘We love you Joe.’ You didn’t see that? I had to do it like fifteen times to make sure I made the sequence. Next time he asks for your ID, show him your cock.”
I reached down between us and caressed the gate opener. Black metal bars slid aside.
In the garage, under its lights, Jess appeared clear and full on the windshield. Thinner even than the glass that made it, the reflection of her smart, finely extended face—smooth brow, slightly drawn cheeks and fireball red lips—nevertheless had me nearly crashing into parked cars at three miles per hour. If I had to play a mating tune on frenzied wings, I might never get laid. Like fruit flies, Jess and I met in a lab. The first job out of college for both of us, it was chemistry. So there’s the whole office romance cliché working for us, but, of course, there’s more. We also have millions of fruit fly hook-ups to mock us. The upside is, it was a hell of a lot of fun to turn the tables on those little rot suckers.
Anyone who’s ever left a banana peel or a piece of lettuce lying around for too long has met a fruit fly. It is, however, another form of familiarity that makes the wee flitters so useful for research. One of Jess’s favorite things to tell people at parties is, “It’s almost alarming how similar a fruit fly’s genes are to a human’s.” (The pronouncement would have more impact if in jeans Jess were not so hard to take for a scientist. Her long legs and beautifully curved butt pack into a pair with a precision that is both pansophic and glamorous.) Appreciation of our genetic kinship with the fruit fly is a relatively recent development, compared to the many decades that fruit flies have been a laboratory darling. This makes the closeness either a stroke of luck, or further evidence of divine drollery. Before we knew how fruitful the fruit fly could be, we used them primarily because of their lightning-like life cycle. They zip through their four stages of life and are grandparents within the space of a week. This flash makes their snapshot easy to take. Amazing things can be done—are being done.
I lay on my back, head propped up and forward on a couple of pillows. Jess’s knees sank into the bed on either side of my head. Inches from my face hovered her ass, as smooth, round and hot as the bulb of a retort. I grazed her fleshy hemispheres with my fingertips, causing her to sway as if buffeted by a wind current. The back and forth motions traveled at least as far as her soft palate, where I could feel their ripples against the head of my cock. As she eased her mouth upward along its throbbing length, her ass moved closer to my face. My tongue slid between her lips and onto her taut clit while my nose pressed her clean, delicately redolent asshole. The way her other set of lips massaged my full, tapered tip, her fingers must have been impressed, even as their work on my balls was equally slick. With exquisite neck strain I reached my organ of taste into her pussy, my chin now applying pressure to her tingle switch. The gusts took hold of us both as one, and we rocked and shuddered until we burst on each other’s tongues.
After a few minutes of sample exchange, Jess broke our post-coital lip-lock and sat on the edge of the bed. She took a big swig from the water bottle on the nightstand.
“Want some?”
As I drank she said, “You know,” knowing full well that I do know, “the male fruit fly uses his tongue on the female’s genitals, don’t you?”
“That the kind of thing you Brandeis girls remember from college?”
“Just think how appalled Mr. And Mrs. Hill would be at the fruits of their daughter’s education.”
“They’d be tongue-tied. But at least her boyfriend licks her genitals for more than just to find out what species she is.”
“Sometimes the way you lick her genitals, she’s not sure you care what species she is.”
Take semen. Ever wonder what all’s in fruit fly come? A complete list would make your head explode. Proteins mostly, it’s a stew so thick that we’re still trying to figure out the recipe and the reason. Which isn’t to say we know nothing—and some of what we know is as bad as a complete list. I specialize in the worst of it. For an understanding of how bad it is, look no further than the name—Sexual Oppugnancy Testing and Design. (And in case Jess’s party favor pearl of wisdom hasn’t made this clear, there’s little about fruit fly come that can’t be said about the human variety.)
Antagonism between the sexes on the molecular level makes a joke of pre-nuptial agreements on the human plane. The sperm and the egg joining forces to create life—that remains the popular conception, even as hardly a day goes by when we don’t find yet another proof for the idea that the two sides are not so joined after all, that they are instead locked in a constant battle for genetic dominance. This new idea may be a little dark, but it shines an insightful light on new discoveries and old assumptions.
Such as this little gem about the seminal fluid of the fruit fly—in it is a protein, genetic material, which migrates, upstream all the way as I see it, to the brain of the female fruit fly. Remember, there’s a lot of stuff in come, and it has to go somewhere, right? Well, some of it is meant to end up in particular places, like the brain. There it activates physical changes in the female. Her sexual appetite is reduced. (Suddenly those red eyes of the males look devilish period, not devilishly handsome.) She makes more eggs, and begins to build a nest. None of this sounds bad for fruit flies, but for that particular female fruit fly it’s a raw deal. Her best strategy for the survival of her genes is to produce a few eggs and then let some fire-eyed he-fly with a wicked wing song and a pons all the way to his Hypandrial process drop some sperm on them. Next she should do it again, hoping that the second woo buzzer has better genes than the first. She could do this three, four, five times and more.
Jess met a woman a year or so ago at a boutique in a part of the city constantly on the verge of being trendy. Sophie is an inch or two shorter than Jess, and thinner too, but she has a similar face—elegant and bright—and their manners are alike. There is one skin-deep difference—Jess has a sweet, ginger flesh tone, whereas Sophie has almond-colored skin. The result of keen battle, it is gorgeous, and she likes to share it with Jess and me.
Once a month or so, coming home from a routine errand, I’ll know, the instant the elevator opens, that the door to our apartment is Door Number One. There is no Door Two, let alone Three. Unmistakable incense reserved for this occasion will have found its way into the hall. It smells woody, cypress I think, and clean—citrus or grass, maybe. I can catch it with the reaction time of a fruit fly and sense the scene. Sophie is splayed on the deep red carpet that feels like a bag made of feathers and stuffed with silk. Her legs are open, facing the door. Sophie’s arms are outstretched at her sides. She holds this T as Jess’s fingers hold open our guest’s labia, exposing and beckoning at once. It is my policy to avoid disappointing Jess, so I immediately kneel between Sophie’s knees and describe wordlessly to Jess with my lips upon hers the flight of my soul on wings of love and thankfulness. Then I bend forward and use my mouth to draw gasps from Sophie.
As I lick, nibble and suck, Jess removes my clothes. When Sophie is swollen and dripping, Jess takes my place and I shift to behind Jess. We’re a self-eating sandwich. I never catch where she pulls it from, but I’ll look up at some point and see Jess working a large, blue and red marbled dildo in and out of Sophie. Able only to grunt a few syllables, it’s fortunate that that’s all it takes for her to indicate her desire to suck my cock. I work my tongue into Jess’s ass as far as I can, for a few good flicks. Then I get up and step around to feed my tongue to her. After nearly sucking it out of my mouth, with a gentle push of her lips and a fierce thrust into Sophie, Jess tells me to lower my by now straining cock into Sophie’s passion pried mouth.
In a while, on the bed, her jaw seems lost between clenched and slack as Jess and I position her onto my cock and onto the dildo, now fastened to a black leather harness strapped across Jess’s hips. Jess looks so hot, I’d practically let her fuck me. She certainly knows how to use the thing. If I hold myself inside of Sophie at the right angle, Jess uses her cock to masturbate mine through the tissue between Sophie’s spaces.
Sophie doesn’t like to stop until we are all slick with her sweat, and tears and snot have joined it on her face. It’s hours since I stepped off the elevator and at last I am placed on my back. Jess and Sophie each take a ball in her mouth. I can’t believe come isn’t seeping through my pores. Sophie has learned from Jess how to back off at the last moment. They like to watch my cock twitch and jerk as if to hint at what it would have done had the sucking and stroking and squeezing continued. They will, in a moment, when it’s possible for Jess to get another five minutes out of me before another fast stop. She knows I’ll never rush it, or her, and she always knows just when to lay Sophie down beside me.
On my knees I straddle Sophie’s belly and Jess begins to suck and pump my cock with long, slow, sloppy strokes. When she feels the first momentous throb she slides her mouth off and milks my cock with one hand and my balls with the other. I grab her hair, or my hair, or just air, and great, thick, long overdue loads of come blast out of me and onto Sophie’s chest, thanks to Jess’s excellent aim. With the last drop out of me, Jess’s eyes half close in a different sort of ecstasy, a pleasure less physical. Her lips part in an inner circler’s grin, and delicate moans accompany her tongue and lips as they lick and suck clean Sophie’s quivering, hypersensitive breasts.
“A load off your mind, baby?” With her eyes on mine, Jess blows softly across Sophie’s small patch of dark hair.
I kneel upright on the bed, my cock still huge but flaccid now, pointing down. My balls hang a couple inches below it. Sophie reaches up and cradles what doesn’t spill out of her hand.
“So delicious. But I don’t know if I’d want one.”
“It’s a matter of protocol, is all,” Jess unscrews the dildo from the harness with the casual air of someone opening a jar of pickles.
“Only protocol allows for outcome.”
In fact, the female fruit fly does take more comers—seven, eight, nine, as many as circumstance will allow.
But what about the protein in the semen? Why hasn’t it sent her homemaking? Because it gets neutralized, by a resistance built up by the female fruit fly’s own proteins. In nature, stalemate is the norm, but it’s a stalemate maintained through bilateral escalation. With each generation, the mind fuck in the male’s come improves somehow—maybe it stumbles upon a way around the resistance—and the female’s “Not So Fast Mister” genes meet the challenge, time after time, generation after generation.
The 29th generation is the Terminal Generation, but we mostly use the name Generation T. Awe shocks.
It’s pretty simple to breed fruit flies in a state of evolutionary stasis—no genetic change from one generation to the next. Technical details here would dull the finish of the concept. An unevolved strain—Strain A—I breed out to 29 generations. On another path to a 29th generation is Strain B—fruit flies allowed to evolve from the same genetic base as Strain A. When I intersect the two strains, and a male does his wing-singing thing, when he sniffs the tiny spines of the Sensilla trichodea lining a female’s vaginal plates, after he strokes the Eighth Tergite with his nearly microscopic forelegs, the brain bending protein in his semen proves to be toxic. Fatal to the female.
Once again, a strand of my come hangs from Jess’s chin. It’s almost ready to fall into my mouth. “I suppose I should tell you…” It lets go of Jess, and I swallow before I continue. “Some of your pals from the Pentagon are coming to see me tomorrow. We might be in for a whole new make of Love-Gun.”
Jess’s red, gooey face lightens. An idea has occurred to her, one that will either make me hard again immediately, or possibly cause me to need a little blue pill.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Oh, nothing, really. Just molasses and cornmeal flavored come.”
Before so obviously superior a woman, what could I do but salute?
-End-