Diary of a Maggot

Diary of a Maggot

 

By

 

Robert T. Jeschonek

Did you ever wo
nder what
maggot
s are singing about as we squirm
through a swath of rancid meat?
As we nibble the steaming feast, growing fatter with each delicious bite?

It's a secret.

All I'm allowed to tell you is that it's the same song we've sung since the beginning of maggots. The same beautiful tune that has lilted through
countless trash dumps, graves, fields, marshes, and homes throughout the countless eons.

And we're singing it again tonight as we comb through this bag of rotten refuse. As I and my hundreds of
brothers, freshly hatched from M
other's eggs
, devour the precious food we need to thrive.

This is paradise.
The air inside the plastic bag is
rank and humid. We move in absolute darkness, the only sound our twitching and nibbling.

And singing.

Here we are, side by side, working hard for a common purp
ose.
Working to
eat and
grow and change and become mothers and fathers ourselves. Can there
be
any more perfect happiness?

I'm writing my own song about it as I feed, composing it in my mind. A song about the Good Work At Hand and the Dream of Flight.
That one thing I long for above al
l others: to lift off, to soar
.
Soon, I will have it, we
all
will. We were
born
to take flight.

And
eating
is the only way to reach that reward. That's why
I wriggle my tiny white body over the rough skin of the carcass, nibbling off pungent mouthfuls
en route
.
Working
my way up to the face
, I
make a bull's-eye for the
tender,
juicy eyeballs. When I squirm under the lid of one eye fo
r a taste, the lid sticks to my body and moves with me--up as I move forward, then down as I back out. If one of his fellow people could see him right now, they'd think the dead man was winking at them, back from the dead.

Suddenly,
my meal is interrupted. S
omeone whistles a warning from afar. One of the lookouts.
Danger! Danger!

We all
freeze at once. We lie still in the sweet
rotting meat
,
listening for a sign, wondering if the alarm is false.

It isn't.
Heavy thuds
resound above us, crossing overhead.
We hear them descend, coming closer, clomping toward us.

Suddenly, bright light flares through the thin plastic shell of the bag. Night becomes day in our sticky, sweet paradise.

Panic flickers through our family like lightning. A united, keening cry rises inside the bag from my brothers and sisters:
Mother, help us!

Even thought we all know Mother isn't coming back. That she's flown away forever.

The thudding sounds come ever closer. I shiver and whimper a little myself
, feeling chills of fear ripple through me.

And then I change my tune. I gather myself up and prepare for what's coming, whatever that might be. I'm determined not to let anything stand between me and my destiny, my dreamed-of soaring.

Boom boom boom.
The thudding comes closer than ever and stops. I sense movement beyond the bag, and I know instantly what it is.

The movement of living meat.
Something
not-dead
come to pay us a call.

The tiniest maggot of the litter, barely half my size,
scoots up and crushes her body against mine. She's shaking uncontrollably
,
her chirping whistle fluttering
with terror
. I hum a little tune, comforting her as best I can.

We hear the thudding sounds again.
Boom boom boom.
Coming closer.
BOOM BOOM BOOM.
We feel the vibrations as they crash down outside the bag.

And
stop.
Stop right there beside us.

Everyone freezes. The tiniest maggot is a block of stone against me.

Then, I sense that movement of not-dead meat again...and the bag jolts upward.
My brothers and sisters wail as the heavy load shifts.

I hear thunderous sounds o
utside--some kind of language?--b
ut I don't understand. "Time to
get rid
of you, old man."

The bag
lurches up
again and swings backward. Thrown from my perch on the skin, tossed away from the tiniest maggot, I roll down through the
splintered
bones of the carcass
and land in a pool of coppery ooze. I get a mouthful and drink it down instantly--salty, metallic,
blood
y
.

Just as I
'm slithering toward the ragged, meaty shore, everything suddenly
drops.
The bag gives way, and our little world of sweet ferment falls straight down like a rock.

Everything goes at once--meat, bones, blood, and maggots.
We hit a hard surface below with a jarring impact and a
splat.

I black out for an instant
. Then, the shrill wailing of my hundreds of brothers and sisters wake
s
me from the darkness.

I'm no longer inside the carcass. The fall shook me off, throwing me onto a cold,
gray
plain
.

Looking up, I get my first glimpse of the
Beast
that has torn my world apart. The nightmare that
rise
s over me into
astronomical
heights.

Though it's the same variety of
creature we were
just
eating
in the bag
,
it looks
far
more horrifying in a not-dead state, towering over us. I recognize the same
body
parts I've been devouring on the
corpse
, only
now, on the Beast, they're
animated and intimidating. Capable of great destruction.

His t
wo mammoth
leg
s
stretch
upward, t
hen merge into a broad
t
runk
.
Further up,
enormous arms frame a
vast
barrel chest
; the chest
bu
rsts
out from under a ribbed white shirt
that leaves his arms
and giant
shoulders
mostly bare
. In the middle of those shoulders, rising up on a veiny stump of a neck, is his huge head.
Glittering bloodshot eyes bulge from a
mane
of bushy red hair, sticking out in all directions from the top of his head to the
blunt stub
of his chin.

The
Beast
looks right at me, and I freeze.
His face crinkles, lips curling up to reveal gleaming yellow teeth.

Then, he snarls out more incomprehensible sounds. "Damn
maggots!
Can't even leave a body alone in a
basement
for
a few days,
can
you?"

I gaze up at this shaggy, towering
Beast
, this rack of living meat,
and I wonder what he'll do next. Is there a chance he might just gather us up with the pile
of
rotting flesh and put us in another bag to resume our pleasant feeding?

Not a chance. "Cheap-ass
garbage bags!
" Howling, he chucks the remains of the shredded bag to the gray plain with the rest of the mess.

Many of my brothers and sisters
head for the fallen bag. Instinctively seeking shelter, dozens of them zip across the gray plain
toward the mound of black plastic.

"Get away!" The great
Beast
belts out more gibberish as he hauls back a booted foot and gives the bag a k
ick. The bag sticks to his booted toe, and he shakes it loose, sending it fluttering away.

Which is when my brothers and sisters make a fatal mistake.
With the bag gone, dozens of them
race toward the nearest cover.

But the nearest cover is
under
the
Beast
's giant boots.

The great
Beast
sees the waves of tiny white creatures
converging
on his feet and lets loose a roar. "Freakin'
maggots!
" My brothers and sisters zoom toward him, undeterred. "
I never knew you could
move
so
damn
fast!
"

Then, it begins. A nightmarish scene I know I'll never forget.
The
Beast
raises one mammoth
leg
in the air, lifting one boot away from the maggot throng. And then...

An
d then, he brings it
down
again.

The screams of my brothers and sisters pierce the air as the boot crushes them. A
s it lands hard atop their soft
white bodies and pivots back and forth, grinding them into mush.

I stare in horror, unable
to look away. I want to scream
, but the cry catches in my throat.

And the worst is yet to come.

Driven by instinct, my surviving brothers and sisters swoop toward the
Beast
's other boot.
T
hey're too close; they lack perspective.
T
hey imagine the other boot is somehow different from the first.

But
it isn't.

The
Beast
roars. "
Die
, you sons a' bitches!"

And then he lifts the second
monstrous leg
. The second boot slides up in the air. Then
plunges.

And the screaming begins anew. Still more of my beloved family are mashed into paste
upon the rough, gray plain.

And still more of us chase after the shelter they sense beneath his other boot.

I steel myself against the slaughter to come...but then the great
Beast
staggers backward. "I
hate
maggots!" My
brothers and sisters follow him as
he backpedals away.

The other maggots trail after him until his boots leave the plain, climbing up a kind of staggered hillside. "I'll be
back,
you
bastards!
"

His boots crash up the hillside, thundering into the heights: BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM.
And then, he's gone. We're alone.

Safe f
or now.

I hear his boots clomping overhead,
pounding into the distance. Heavy weights fall far away, and things rattle and clang.

I turn to what's left of my family. Less than a hundred of us now, str
ewn
across the gray flats in a state of shock. Some
still and silent, some
weaving between the pale smears of our siblings' crushed bodies, weeping openly.

Welcome to the war zone.

I feel wobbly as I wriggle
across the devastation. How is this
possible?
We were so
happy
...and now
this.

The clatter from above continues, growing louder. It fills me with new purpose. I
know
the
Beast
will be
back.
Somehow, I have to save the rest of my family
from his wrath.

Calling out to the others, I tell them to gather near. I tell them the
Beast
will return, and we have to work together to survi
ve.

Slowly, they come around. Shake themselves out of their shellshock and drift toward me.

Soon, I'm in the middle of a circle. My remaining family, nearly a hundred strong, fans out around me, listening to
what I say.

I tell them we must find good hiding places far from the
Beast
and hole up until his rampage
ends
. There's no reason we can't survive this as long as we play it smart
.

The tiniest maggot squirms out of the crowd to face me.
Her chirping whistle surges with newfound courage.
Shouldn't we try to
stop
him? she asks. How can we let this savage
monster
roam free? How many
more
of our kind will he
slaughter
in times to come?