Step 5: When the Lull-A-Fly wears off, most of your drosophila will be
alive, a few will be dead. You can tell them apart by the tiny tailored suits and gowns on the newly dead.
Step 6: Watch them begin the mating practice. The live males repeatedly beat their
wings, making songs of pulse and sine that never fail to allure. The dead also make their
bodies instruments, but their songs of experience well up from deeper, profound places.
Step 7: Position your magnifying glass above the opening of the vial. Notice how the live
male will “strike” or jump toward the female from any direction, landing on top of her
thorax. The dead, shorn of their previous physical gifts and gender identities, dip one
prothoracic leg in the syrup of rotted peach, cup it gently, and approach another dead
fly only from the front.
Step 8: Wait for the live female to thrust her ovipositor into the genital opening of the
male to obtain the sperm ejaculate. While the live flies copulate, observe any dead fly
shyly glance at the now more-sepia-than-red eyes of another dead fly, rest a
mesothoracic leg on the other’s near-transparent wing, and stroke the bend of their
partner’s antenna with the foreleg dabbed in moldered peach perfume.
Step 9: Look away.
