The Voice Problem

A fly went to see a psychiatrist for a troubling mental complaint. Every time he spoke, it sounded to him as though a fly were speaking. This was whether he was speaking aloud or thinking to himself, inside his own head. "It comes out as sort of fly-like buzzing!" he lamented to the psychiatrist, who was himself just then perched upside down on the ceiling of the consultation room, vibrating his wings. "Very interesting," the shrink thrummed and rubbed his fore-legs together to savor the conundrum even better. The fly psychiatrist was actually fantasizing about horse excrement, how sensuous and inviting it was. Even more than a fly femme fatale on her best day. "It's like a long didgeridoo sound that never ends," the poor fly told the doc. "Well, are you hearing it  even now?" the doctor probed. The fly paused a moment to listen to his thoughts."Yes, even now," he confirmed. "And my voice, the voice of a doctor with many success stories, do you hear it as only the drone of a fly, a small hairy bag of being with a striking proboscis, the sonic output of eight limited chromosomes?" "Yes, I believe we are both buzzing," the patient sadly admitted. "How worthless patients are," the fly doctor thought. "Patient is a terrible misnomer. If patients were patient, most of their problems would be solved by time or death." But they had to show up and bother him. "I'm going to write you a prescription for absolute solitude," the doctor concluded. "If you follow my treatment regimen faithfully, I will never see you again. Also, never feed again from anything that even vaguely resembles a proboscis. And your identity problem should swiftly resolve. Please stop at the payment window before taking to the sky."  The fly did as he was told and was soon starving to death. But the doctor was correct. His voice began to change. The buzz disappeared. There was only a thin sound that issued from his body now. It was translucent like the voices of clouds. On his last day, the fly realized the wings had been his problem all along. How had the doctor missed that? What a quack!  He castrated himself of his wings and his voice by flying at a razor-sharp piece of broken glass in the window of an abandoned house. He fell to the dank wooden floor of an empty house and listened to his own blessed silence. There was nothing even remotely fly-like about him. When a child exploring the vacant house stepped on him moments later, his final cry of anguish, he noted with pride, had not one iota of buzz left in it. It sounded like the scream of the paragon of animals. The pride inside him separated itself off from its animal. He stared at it a millisecond as a proud parent does with its newborn. And then he was something like a niggling doubt that he forgot.