Yet another identify this story!

It’s been bugging me for a while now. Pun was not intended, but I’m leaving it there.

It was a short story, IIRC. In a collection of other stories? By the same author perhaps? I don’t think it was a collaborative effort, but I could be wrong.

A man is in his house and there’s a fly in his house. The man is a bit crazy, because as the story progresses he becomes more and more convinced the fly is mocking him. He starts taking after the fly with a gun. A shotgun perhaps? Or maybe a rifle. And somewhere toward the end of the story, we have a scene of his wife and children, shot with the gun he’s wielding, with flies all over their corpses.

Thankee kindly.

One bump, then it dies a fly-stricken death.

You might want to wait a bit longer than seven minutes to give it a bump. Just sayin’.

Unfortunately, I don’t recognize the story, but I’m eager to find out what it is.

You might wanna learn to discern between AM and PM. Just sayin’.

Ha! Hold on, gotta wipe some egg off my face.

Nothing to see here, people, move along, move along…

Hold Still! I see a fly on that egg!
(raises gun)

LOL. I know that was a misunderstanding, but it reminds me of another board I read where people bump their topics LITERALLY as soon as they’re done posting them. It’s so WTF.

Sorry, I’ve never heard of the story, but I’d have liked to read it if I didn’t already know the ending now. Sounds cool.

Sorry for spoilering :slight_smile:

But it’s still worth a read if we can ever figure out what it is. I remember it creeped the hell out of me, more so than any other story in the book (obviously, or I may have remembered something about the other stories). I’d like to see if it holds up to a repeated reading.

The crazy thing is that it’s probably in a book I own, but a) they’re all packed to move and b) I have hundreds of books scattered around the place, so I wouldn’t even know where to begin looking.

There’s a very similar plot (except it involves a centipede and not a fly) in the short story “The Conqueror Worm” in Stephen R. Donaldson’s “Daughter Of Regals and other Tales”. I doubt that’s it, but what the hey.

Someone on this board once identified that story for me as the one that had triggered/contributed to my utter horror of centipedes to this day. If it was you, thank you for answering that question and letting me thus continue to steer clear of the story! That being said, assuming it was correctly identified for me, I’m pretty sure the plot differs in more respects than the identity of the plaguing insect. (I could be wrong, though, as I resolved to not read it again after the first time.)

I’m pretty sure the guy starts swinging a large knife or machete to dispose of the beast.

Even if that isn’t the case, I’m pretty sure the only one who suffers from his efforts is himself, and in a particularly unpleasant fashion. But again, I resolved to not read it again and may have only fixated on that particular wounding and on some of the beast’s terrorization of them.