In Continuum.

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz

Well I'm a human fly
It's spelled F-L-Y
I say buzz, buzz, buzz, and it's just 'becuzz'...
I'm a human fly and I don't know why
I got ninety six tears in my ninety six eyes

It was a peaceful night at home, with my mother and I relaxing in her room watching the television when the peace was interrupted by the shrillest scream. It was my sister's voice, and the both of us dashed down the corridor to her rescue. In our minds, we pictured a masked serial murderer climbing through her bedroom window with a butcher knife. Or perhaps she slammed the drawer on her fingers and broke them all off as a result. Or even the pen knife she uses to cut her artworks was accidentally ran across her palm, slicing it in two. To make it even more ridiculous, perhaps at the window was the floating body of an UFO, with aliens reaching out trying to abduct my sister. All sorts of possibilities, until the moment we turned the corner into her room.

She was standing in the middle of it all, with the side of her shirt lifted up. She was staring down at her stomach area, and we thought somebody stole her kidney or something. But of course, nobody climbed through the window, nobody stole her kidneys. She didn't slice her palm or chop off her fingers, but was standing there screaming like a mad woman all because a little beetle flew onto her stomach. She stared wide-eyed at the little insect, face turning white and finally lost her breath to scream anymore. I took the beetle in between my thumb and index finger, and with a gentle flick, I threw it out of the window and saw it fly away into the night. The end of my sister's crisis.

I got a garbage brain, it's drivin' me insane
And I don't like your ride, so push that pesticide
And baby I won't care, 'cause baby I don't scare
'Cause I'm a reborn maggot using germ warfare

My sister has this childhood fear of all insects. It all started with the day when we visited Sentosa a little more than ten years ago. Every kid has a little fear of insects I guess, and at that time my sister's fear for them was still ranging in the normal 'yellow' zone of the scale. That status remained unchanged until my parents brought us to the Butterfly Gallery, where there was an enclosed greenhouse of some kind full of butterflies. It was like entering a tropical jungle at first, with giant black nets that acted as the ceiling and the walls all around, we were transported into a completely different world of butterflies. They were fluttering everywhere, stopping on my head and then taking off once I moved a single muscle. But it wasn't such a pleasant experience for my sister.

She hid behind me most of the time, screaming and screaming until I asked her to shut the hell up because she was scaring the butterflies away. But she just kept on screaming and screaming, until we came upon this stone statue in the middle of a clearing. There was a wire gauze over the top of the stone bowl, so we couldn't reach our hands into whatever that was inside. But when we took a closer peek, we found out that there were a dozen scorpions inside, crawling over and under each other - sort of like the scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, when Indy steps into the insect filled tunnel with short-round. I was there shouting "COOL!" while my sister fainted.

I'm a human fly
It's spelt F-L-Y
I say buzz, buzz, buzz, and it's just 'becuzz'...
I'm a unzipped fly and I don't know why
and I don't know,but I say

I bought a specimen of the scorpions afterwards, framed up in a glass box and was later hung up on my bedroom wall. My sister was just plain traumatized, and was later transported home safely without the mentioning of the butterflies at all. So that was the beginning of my sister's fear for insects. Even now when she sees ants crawling on her table, she'd tape them up and then stick the tape on the wall for reuse. She doesn't dare to touch even the smallest of all insects, so you can imagine what happened when we saw a strayed cockroach in my house.

Cockroaches don't usually appear here, but they do excess the house by crawling up the rubbish chute at the back sometimes. I can count the number of cockroaches that I have seen in my house over the past fifteen years with my ten fingers, but my sister causes quite an uproar whenever she witnesses one. So it is usually up to my mother or myself to terminate those six-legged horrors from hell with a rolled up newspaper or slippers. My sister on the other hand, would hide behind one of us and scream her head off until the insect is completely dead and flushed down the toilet. Even then, she still feels the legs crawling on her skin and all over her body. It's pretty amazing how much an insect can do to her without touching her at all. So you see, the beetle on her stomach was - well, as good as being robbed at gun point.

My mother was gardening today at the balcony when she folded a grasshopper out of a blade of leaf today. She showed it to us when we were children - before my sister became absolutely petrified about anything related to insects. She folded one again today, and even the fake grasshopper caused my sister to flew backwards about ten steps. But anyway, I took a couple of pictures of what my mother folded, hoping to catch a glimpse of her brilliance before the grass starts to turn yellow. My sister is the loudest and the fiercest in the house, the person with the worst temper. But when it comes to insects - even the ones made from grass - she becomes a timid mouse altogether.

Buzz, ride tonight
And I say buzz...rocket ride
And I say buzz...I don't know why
I don know I just don't know why?