Long ago, underneath a yellow acacia tree, a redheaded green fly had smashed one of its see-through wings against the dancing branches. A small episode in the Kalahari that wouldn’t be overheard because of the angry wind threatening to dig up the papery tree. 

The crystal wing was not wholly off though. The green fly freaked out and buzzed. It was a purring whine as the fly looked at the other flying insects; like the soaring dragonfly, and the red long-tailed birds greedily pecking the black ants. 

The fly whirred even louder, and unfortunately ripped off its breakable wing. The olive-green fly kept on calling other flies of its tribe to rescue him. There was little that the bottle green flies could do, but the king fly alighted next to its subject. 

“Oh! I’m sorry you lost one of your wings!” he hummed. 

“Be grateful, it’s only one wing,” the wise King said, taking off. 

“I want to fly,” the green lly said, helplessly flipping the remaining wing. 

The fly couldn’t just take off. The deafening buzzes have attracted the interest of flesh-eating black ants. By now, the wind had stopped, and the sun was cake-baking the ground, with more black tyre-smelling ants racing to their wind-fanned burrow under the golden tree. 

One nosey ant went to investigate the hum by poking the fly, and soon the buzzing grew into an ear-splitting hullabaloo. The ant kept on nudging the grounded fly that was just crawling about. 

“I don’t want to crawl like a maggot,” the green fly said. 

“I want to fly,” he cried. 

“I want to glide above the maggot-ridden ground. I want to fly far away to the juicy but rotten skeletons of the famine-doomed cows,” the hungry fly continued. 

His insults angered the black ants that had been crawling all their life long. Soon, one stinging ant after another showed up and stabbed the noisy fly. Thus, the black army of ants ripped the green fly into chewable pieces in the blink of an eye. 

They dragged each kapana-spiced piece towards the burrow and had a buffet.  

When the king fly returned with his mouth dipped in the sticky tree gums in order to glue the broken wing, the whining fly was all gone.

Footnote: Complaining attracts more harm than good.