So you want to
play God. A perfectly innocent and harmless pasttime, especially if all that you want to do is
bring a fly back to life.
This exact thought occured to me and five or six other guys around 3 o'clock on a Sunday morning, after a night of
getting high and sitting around a coffee table being
utterly bored. As conversation progressed, Saul mentioned that you can resurrect a dead fly with salt. Apparently he's done it before, and the idea of doing it again immediately appealed to everyone. So, we agreed that the following steps were about to be followed:
1. To bring a fly back to life, you need to obtain a fly.
There is certain difficulty in doing so, mainly because flys are not a common sight at 3am in the morning during November in the Southern Hemisphere. But we happened to be lucky, and after about 10 minutes of looking idly around the room, Nathan caught a fly. How we did that, I don't know. The particular details escape me. What was good though, was the fact that we now had a fly in a glass. We called him Ed, and all had a good look at him to make sure that Ed was a perfectly normal fly. He was. Onto step 2 ...
2. The fly has to be dead.
This is more difficult that you can imagine. Under normal circumstances a dead fly originates from the impact of something hard upon a live fly. Obviously, we could not do that, as we needed the fly's internal organs to be intact. So we decided we'd drown the fucker. "Drowning a fly shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes" said Saul with a competent look on his face. Right. To cut a long story short, it took 6 of us roughly about 40 minutes to kill Ed. Firstly, he was floating around in the water upside down, probably still breathing. So we got a second glass into the first one in such manner as to ensure that Ed would stay under water permanently. This is what we did:
\ / glass 2
\ \ / /
\ \ / / glass 1
\--\----/--/
\ \__/ /
\ ** / ** = Ed
\____/
This crudely fashioned device pretty much made sure that the fly would be unable to get oxygen in any way. Fully under the water, the fly still refused to follow through our step 2 for at least 20 minutes. Rhys and me said we should microwave it, go to sleep and forget about it. Fortunately, some of us were more patient.
3. Carefully transfer the dead fly onto a piece of paper, and cover it with salt.
Transferring the fly onto paper did not prove to be difficult - we simply drained the glass through some filter paper. After carefully poking it with a piece of plastic, we were certain that the fly was dead. Now for the main attraction - cover Ed in salt. "Why salt" you may wonder. The truth is, I don't know. Saul said so. It was his idea, not mine. But it made so much sense ... So we put about a tea spoon worth of salt onto the fly, fully covering him. Some salt got eaten along the way, some got spilled, but the fly was covered in it. Right ... we proceed.
4. Wait as the fly comes back to life
Clearly the most exciting part. After about 5 minutes of staring at the fly, one of its legs started twitching. After another 20 minutes or so the head moved. Mind you, by this time it was already past 4 am in the morning, and we have spent way more time on this project than our attention span allowed. So we called it a night, and decided that we'll continue this in the morning. "Give the fly some time" we thought. And by that time there was definitely some leg movement, and it was way more alive than 40 minutes prior, after being filtered out of a glass.
5. The Aftermath - The Morning.
It was dissapointing. After waking up with a major headache and a rumbling stomach that was complaining about lack of food in it, we noticed the fly was still there. It did not fly away. It did not resurrect. It was still there. Suddenly we were faced with a dead fly covered in salt. It was certainly a let-down, especially that it nearly worked before we went to sleep, and Saul claimed it worked for him. Eventually we agreed that Saul just didn't drown the fly long enough, and therefore his previous expremiment was inconclusive. We on the other hand did a thorough job, and made sure the fly was dead before proceeding to resurrect it. And so we ended up with one dead fly, plus now we had to clean up all the salt, spilled water and empty glasses. We then fed the dead fly to the cat, who seemed moderately pleased with it.