Ventura, California has the usual coastal menagerie of flora (lots of succulents) and fauna with a couple exceptions: the driftwood is mostly bamboo and, probably because of the local agriculture, the most common pest is the crane fly (“mosquito hawk,” “daddy long-legs”). It’s these I’d like to talk about. The two funnel-web spiders in either corner of my kitchen window prompted me to leave my screen door open a crack to let in crane flies as a way of feeding them. But there’s no reliable way to limit fly intake to a spider-subsistence level, so I end up having as many or more crane flies curled up dead by the baseboard as wrapped up in webbing. It is with a unique dignity that these crane flies die—I said “curled,” but it is less rounded than that, more that they form angular cages with their death-rigor’d legs and their wings lose their former lively clearness for a brittle, gossamer mummy skin. The reason they end up dead at the baseboards is that they spend away their captive lives butting against the walls until they reach the ceiling and, perhaps in despair, land there and hang indefinitely. Unemployed and depressed, I watch these and I noticed that they often lose legs in their butting, increasing the angle of their remaining legs in their resting. I eventually saw a fly with three legs in a “Y” pattern, then two in a “V,” and finally, today, a crane fly just below my bedroom ceiling hanging by a single leg, “I,” and I am reminded of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, her main character considering her own gestation: “I (and that slenderest word is too gross for the rare thing I was then) walked forever through reachless oblivion… and suddenly—My ravishers left their traces in me, male and female, and over the months I rounded, grew heavy, until the scandal could no longer be concealed and oblivion expelled me.” I have called “that slenderest word” when seriffed a column, of a temple maybe, but that all crumbled as narcissism as I considered or reconsidered the “I” of that crane fly and realized I was not the single column left of an antique ruin, but the literal last leg of an insect that wastes its gift of flight in an unangelic, unsoaring battle with a wall bigger than its understanding until I fall to the carpet, the single useless bar of a cage holding nothing.