short fiction · 2026-10-28

The Frequency of Sweetness

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The neuron pair CB0573 sits in the protocerebrum like a secret the fly keeps from itself. At three hundred hertz the current sings through membrane and microtubule, a note too high for wings but perfect for the descending paths that coil toward the ventral nerve cord. Thirteen sugar neurons on the right side, fifty hertz each, hum their own chord — sucrose, fructose, the ghost of a rotting peach. When the two frequencies meet in the mushroom body they do not add; they multiply. The fly does not taste. It remembers a future it has not lived yet. The proboscis extends before the odor arrives.