Maggot

Thick, writhing ropes of segmented flesh dangled down—fat and spined, vivid with mold. Some were as large as my forearm, others small enough to slip into an ear. I had never seen such a riot of color. The trees were stripped bare, their skeletal branches reaching toward the sky in the height of summer. Those who had braved the storm and survived now hid indoors, their skin marked with bite wounds. Bronze tanks roamed the streets. Every night, the question of what to eat loomed. Nothing felt safe—bugs were found in every hidden space: burrowed into bedsheets, curled inside ovens. Some nights, I simply chewed them from beneath my fingernails.

I heard of an old man entombed in his own basement. Of young women suffocated in their sleep. Bloated cysts, burrowed sores, red sludge spreading across skin. No one was untouched. No night was simple. Suicide rates soared, quadrupling in mere weeks. The sale of aspirin, rope, and razors was outlawed. Other methods grew more gruesome—one night, a hundred people leapt from a skyscraper hotel.

Whispers spread: what did it want? The airwaves filled with sermons—how to repent, what could save us, who to follow, what to believe. At night, you could hear it: the hushed murmur of a billion prayers, countless lips moving in desperate unison.

Meanwhile, the cities were swallowed in silk. Chrysalises stretched over highways, homes sealed shut by hive growth. Each step crushed something inside the cocooned walls. We waited. We blinked through the long nights.

And then, at last, the unveiling: ten billion butterflies erupting into the sun, their wings beating so fiercely, the noise drowned out thought itself.