There once was a great excavator, and inside the cab was a fly. The little buzzer had lived in this massive machine since he was a tiny little maggot.
Most days, the fly would play inside the machine while the driver dug along the base of a small mountain.
In in the fly’s short fifteen day life, the man had not once swatted at him as he flew about, even when landing on the human’s nose twice.
One afternoon, moments after the man had exited the cab of the colossal machine, the fly sensed a tiny rumble coming from the mountain. The tremor was brief, and it quickly returned to wherever it had been before.
The driver of the excavator, walking to his car, felt the quake but thought it had been the grumbling of his fat, hairy belly. Fortunately, this musing had reminded the man of his lunchbox. The man performed an about face and returned to his excavator.
As the man reached into the cab, the fly felt the earth shake beneath him once again.
This driver, having been excavating for over twenty years, was accustomed to a constant rumble under his feet and gave the second quake no thought.
The fly noticed pebbles rolling down the side of the mountain. But the driver, oblivious to the whole ordeal, snatched up his lunchbox, stepped out of the machine, and consoled his stomach…“I must be pretty hungry; my belly’s giving me fits,” he said to his empty lunchbox.
The fly watched the driver walk to and enter his car and drive away.
Suddenly, the earth upgraded its ground-shaking performance to constant, eruptuous fits. Above him, the cliff’s edge cracked down its face.
The fly watched as the crack widened.
A group of school children played on a playground above at the Mountain Top School for Vibrationally Challenged Children; not only could the children not feel the earth breaking below them, but neither could their teacher, a former alumni.
Below, the fly calculated whether the excavator could hold the enormous cliff above him. He determined, in his tiny fly-brain, that it could.
Now seeing as this fruit fly had lived in this digger since his birth, he could only assume that he could drive the enormous beast. He landed on the column responsible for controlling the long yellow arm of the claw. He pressed his small body against the driving stick and… nothing. He pushed even harder…and nothing happened. He realized he was at least a hundred times too small. The surrounding earth performed its volatile tectonic-al dance number once again.
The fly searched the cab for an exit. A small round hole glared at him from the corner of the excavator door.
As the children frolicked in the field above, the fly squeezed its tiny, fat butt through the hole while screaming for the children to run.
Suddenly the cab door opened, and the fly rocketed away from the digger. He made a beeline towards the cliff, but stopped to see why the excavator door had flung open– the excavator driver had returned.
While the driver dug through the excavator glove box to find his money for lottery tickets and fireworks, the fly kamikaze dove into the bitter, middle-aged man’s ear-hole.

“Zippo!” The fly buzzed.

The driver jammed his calloused pinky into his crusty ear. The fly crawled further into his ear canal; each time the man pressed his giant yellow fingernail towards the fly, he buzzed his wings against the man’s eardrum. He stretched back his chest, clinched his sucker-feet to the walls of the ear canal and screamed, “The mountain’s going to fall! Do something quick!”
The wax-covered fingertip froze.
The fly screamed, “They’re all gonna die!”
This time, the man heard the voice. The ground shook again with a force resembling a volcanic eruption, smaller than volcanoes on the news, but much larger than a chocolate fondant fountain at a fancy wedding.
The driver maneuvered the massive arm towards the mountain; as the large rocks fell, the machine pressed against the cliff, and for a brief moment, the rocks were pinned and the kids hadn’t plunged into the poorly planned rock quarry below.
The children never realized their predicament; the teacher also never read the automated text from the county school board concerning the earthquake, for being their best worker, her phone sat securely in her pocket, and unfortunately, per county rules, was set to vibrate.
As the falling rocks crushed the mighty excavator, the driver died, fulfilling the commands of the voice in his own head, but the fly found himself trapped in someone else’s head forever.