The desiccated carcass lay on its back, twisted legs bent at all angles, transparent wings out flat and the dry empty abdomen shrunk in on itself.

Amidst the clutter of the window ledge, the long unoccupied spider web, dead flies and other small dead and dried out insects, there was a wasp struggling and audibly bumping the glass in its efforts to gain freedom.

Mr. Yuan greets the new day with a stretch and a yawn. He walks over to the window, unhooks the latch and swings it open to throw a handful of chicken scratch out into the yard to the waiting chickens. A little vortex of dust follows the opening window and the glare of the morning sun hits Mr. Yuans’s eyes.

‘Ah, choo!’ Mr. Yuan sneezed, ‘ah choo, ah, ah, CHOO!’

To the micro-mites and tinier inhabitants of the ledge, a hurricane force wind has just rolled over the tiny landscape, dislodging habitat and inhabitants. The gnat carcass, the weightless remainder, tumbles up on the leading edge of the sneeze blast, is propelled out into the lingering swirl of rotating air from the window opening and enters a newly forming thermal updraft that swiftly carries the gnat higher than he had ever been in life, up to where the hunting birds and scavenger birds, the hawks and vultures, slowly circle in the rising current.

Near the top of the thermal, the lift weakens and the birds can go no higher. Up continues the gnat, until the last of the thermal lift is too weak to support even a weightless dead gnat.

The prevailing westerly, the breeze that circles the globe at this latitude, has got hold of the little traveler and he is carried along on a slow spiral down to the surface, but is caught once again in an upwelling current of warmer air feeding the building cloudhead, up the central shaft of rapidly rising air only to pop out again near the top.

Dust from the Gobi Desert carries across the Sea of Japan, across the wide Pacific, across California and the western part of the US. It mixes and blends with air and dust from countless breezes, thermals, dust vortexes, jet contrails, volcano venting, commercial exhaust, cow farts and everything else that happens in air.

And now in the reverse of the launch cycle that carried our traveler to dizzying heights and across immeasurable tracks, a collision occurs over Colorado between the current of air carrying the Mongolian gnat, and another pool of opposing air currents. Time stops, space stops, lift stops.

The gnat’s body tumbles slowly, slowly for another couple of hundred miles and comes down in Kansas.

Martha opens the kitchen door of the farmhouse to throw some table scraps out to the chickens in the yard. The slight breeze carries the the Mongolian gnat’s tattered remains, now down to one wing and only two of his legs, no head, no abdomen, almost invisible, into the air near Martha’s grandchild in the highchair, inhaled into the perfect nostril of this perfect child.

‘Ah, choo!’, a slight and nearly silent little sneeze and the gnat’s remains are expelled, this time into shattered individual particles of dust with no structure left at all.

‘Bless you,’ the grandmother’s ever alert ears have heard and answered the sneeze, answered Mr. Yuan’s sneeze that launched the gnat five days earlier.

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