The Maggot

1.

The hamlet. 1786. February. Sleet rain in the plow treads and Mr. Baker’s tobacco stalks, dead and black and frosted. As grey as the midwest can birth, as quiet as the roiling. Dark so that the chickens sleep in. The tavern and the post office and Mrs. Wilson proselytizing. We. Glad, despite the cold. Glad and drowsy, and what a pride to till the soil and be forgotten. The gentle ashen hills. The river that never freezes. The stale manure smell and the acrid fireplaces and the dusty maypoles in storage. The nothing before and the nothing after. Joyless winter. Joyful togetherness. The new pretending to be the old.

On a cold and middling Tuesday morning we woke to find that a rather large maggot had appeared in Mr. Baker’s north field. An acre wide and twice as tall as a barn, the first person to see it — one of the little Clark boys — thought it was a cloud, slick and bulbous at the horizon. There was nothing to suggest where it came from. At its edges were furrowed lines of dead tobacco, and then it. No drag marks. No piled Earth from Satan ejecting spawn, nor breaks in the cloud cover from an angel’s fall. Nothing. By ten a.m. it was the talk of the hamlet. We drank our coffee round ice-cracked fence gates and sipped liquor at the tavern and soon, around eleven, came to the same idea. Like a slowly surging mass, we gathered around the north field and the maggot and Mr. Baker. He ran from clumping family to awe-struck loner, imploring them to share his rage. Mrs. Wilson declared it a sign of the end times. Sgt. Clark thought it was a ploy by city investors. We could only stare. We could only take in the behemoth as it slowly breathed, in and out, backwards and forward. By noon the sun had pierced the clouds, shimmering against the body of the maggot like candlelight on fine silk.

Over the next few days our discussions enveloped us, as if words had any weight in the face of that thing. Many sat out in the cold, huddled together at criss-cross campfires to stare into it. Mrs. Baker got after her and other people’s kids for trying to climb the sides, for painting on it with mud and straw, and for scaring the littlest ones with stories about the maggot that was coming to eat them. She wouldn’t admit the slight fear she felt when her son brought up the fact that maggots tended to hatch into something. It was dumb luck, one of us said, that it should appear right next to “main street,” which barely deserved the title — just a dirt road with the tavern, general store, and post office hanging onto it like ticks on the back of a shaggy dog. There we gathered again, holding our backs straight (as we were serious people), and decided that maybe we shouldn’t tell anyone about it. We’d had enough excitement for one week, and besides, it could be gone by the next. Sgt. Clark passed out a round of his wheat whiskey so we could celebrate. We were hopeful. It hadn’t done anything. Just sat, a sack of oil and lipids. Then somebody remembered they were expecting a letter, and we looked collectively to the post office across the street, and then realized that our plan would fail. Mr. Baker suggested that we shoot at it with muskets until it died. Mrs. Wilson said that bullets can’t kill the devil, and we nodded because no one really thought that was a good idea anyway.

The stagecoach arrived the very next day. The mailman, usually so civically composed, dropped his letters to the mud the second he saw it. Astounded with us and how unfazed we were by that point, he left in as much of a huff as one can in a heavy coach. By March tourists were pouring in from surrounding villages, and by April the throngs were so great that Mr. Baker’s adjacent fields were getting trampled. In the tavern he spent many nights grumbling about “respect” to anyone who could bear it. He hated change, saw a sequestered farming life as a serene and unchanging fate now being stomped on by people who didn’t know or care for the context. He didn’t think about the forests that had preceded him and the hamlet, the people then the animals and so on. Like most, he only perceived change when it didn’t suit him.

By midsummer we’d got it in our heads that it had to be moved. With tourists and transients as an audience, we snaked a rope around the maggot and heaved. Nothing happened, of course. Whether out of pity or desperation we were required to indulge Mrs. Wilson, who then proceeded to lead a troop of the faithful into the local Shawnee camp. In a display of hack theatre heretofore unseen in this corner of the Northwestern Purchase, Mrs. Wilson pleaded with the tribe elders to help expel the maggot. As devil worshippers, she reasoned, they must have some sway with it. They laughed in her face. We pretended to be surprised, but Mr. Baker had tried the muskets, and Sgt. Clark had written the army, and nothing had worked. You could learn to accept almost anything.

The summer waned and the fields around the tavern were sold — not all could live in its shadow. Those who did developed the land into shops and boarding houses that served the bloating population of newcomers. Later a makeshift wharf was constructed on the river bank, and something resembling a real main street started to take form, the transients becoming residents, the sickliest farms becoming semi-urban picket streets, the world changing and, in a few years, Mr. Baker himself selling it all. It was sad to see him marching down to his new job at the tobacco processing plant. The stout buildings of our village center were a gravel-pocked wreath around the maggot, the unknowable catalyst it was.

2.

The village. 1803. May. Sun-baked dirt on the maggot’s back. Seams of ochre. The windowless mills. Factories starting to sprout and cobblestones on Main Street and streamers bought for burgeoning bourgeoisie. Blue skies, banished frost. Yellow ripples across the fields. Waste baking ripe in open alleys. Imported, rain-streaked windows. The first suits. Imitation Greek columns on the new house on the hill. A Sunday market. The schoolhouse mistress’s starched gown and the reek of lye in schoolchildren’s nostrils. The village nameplate. The docks and the wharf, and isn’t it nice to rest amongst the frogs and croak along the trundling of history? Rumored steamboats. Louis Baker winning first election and the mosquitoes that follow him. Bite bite bite.

The spring dew lingered on ladybug brick and unblemished paintjobs long into the morning, misting upwards at its own pace, rising and weathering but so slow that it looked like this new world might stay shiny forever. The village, a rosebud; the maggot, fertilizer. Workers and rich men alike woke and discussed the “Indian question” over coffee, the latest in a long line of barriers to PROGRESS proposed in the Village Herald. Louis Baker sat inside the two-room town hall and watched the droplets on the window. Boxes of now-useless signs and banners littered the void beneath his desk, commemorating his one kept election promise — a march on the state capital of Chillicothe, with a guarantee that the maggot wouldn’t be moved, dissected, changed. See, a generation of us had grown up with the maggot as a constant backdrop, there like the wind was there, like the river, like the hills. The fear surrounding it survived only in the elderly, in those who grew up without its soft and lilting shadow. Louis saw opportunity in it. Many were simply happy to be along for the ride — so easy to get used to, with visions of New York and Boston in our hearts. There was a dream there, in those cities that grew so big that loneliness meant something. Our town was in its adolescence. Teen-aged. Like teenagers, we lived blissfully unaware of that which was shaping us.

Margaret Walsh, with her tangled red hair and narrow eyes, rasped on the town hall’s door. We weren’t sure what to make of her. Her zeitgeist existed perpendicular to ours, and she knocked and Louis Baker ignored her. When she saw the maggot, she saw the impermanence of the things we take for granted, the injustices, the world itself. Alfred Jones, dressed in his business finest, came up and asked for Louis through the door. When he opened up, Margaret barged in behind him.

The two men reclined while Margaret berated them. They sat with shoulders back, uncomfortable but unfazed, their social station like a thick carapace.

“This isn’t Kentucky, gentlemen — slavery’s been banned. How can you possibly justify this?” Margaret asked.

Alfred rolled his eyes, fishing in the corner of his cheek for a bit of leftover breakfast. “They’re in violation of city ordinance, Mrs. Walsh. If I did the same I would be subject to a similar punishment.”

“Exactly,” Louis continued, “their tribe sits on land they neither own nor pay taxes for. They’re refusing to give it up. Ergo, they have a perfectly legal debt to pay.”

“It’s slavery,” Margaret said.

“Indentured servitude. For a limited period, I might add,” Alfred said.

“Five years, for the lord’s sake.”

Louis laughed. “Why do you care?”

She stormed out, didn’t answer. Down the stone streets and past all the buildings new or under construction, to the river where the indentured would build a wharf and then a bridge, to the hills where they would build roads, to the fields where, under the temperate, May sun Louis Baker would continue to extend the period of servitude to ten, twenty, thirty years. She wandered past the factories and the shops and the fish-schools of people, only recognizing some of them, chiefly recognizing how small she felt in the growing waves of us. Us, who pacified the maggot, who shaped it through perspective, who turned the unexplainable from fear into weapon. Margaret sat next to the marshmallow giant with old Mrs. Wilson, planning her resistance, her vengeance for parents who toiled long ago in the early colonies. Many of us had designs that clashed with each other, yet all acknowledged the inevitability, the lamentable separation.

As the village grew, community shrunk. Margaret would have a daughter named Ethel who would marry a Clark, grandson of the old Sergeant, and convince him to run for office, and to win, and to abolish indentured servitude in the wake of civil war and tensioned reconstruction. We weaved in and out of each other’s lives like cells in a growing creature, obsessed with winning and losing and fighting to mould the we that escaped us, that blossomed enough to obscure its original cause. By the time the first public brush lights were installed in 1887, the maggot had become an old relic. We didn’t see it unless we passed by the corner of Main and Baker, and we surely didn’t think much of it. It was just another public park, a curiosity that spawned a thing that was no longer like itself in infancy. Like a preserved old cabin, or a cracked liberty bell, or the maypoles and streamers that hadn’t been brought out in decades. The maggot’s only friends were our children as children, those who hadn’t yet been conditioned to normalize the remarkable.

3.

The city. 1917. August. Burnt-sienna newspaper pulp and ink as distant as Ypres, third visit, quicksand mud like city mud like every mud. Model T Capital T’s up and down the avenues, bumbling over cobblestones, stones that cry and grumble at the kid’s new world. Short hair. The city of bricks, windows tiny, the bridge bigger and the ice cream shops and the stick of sugar on the fingers of children. The distant war — we hope we’re not too late. Buildings in “beautiful Modern Rectangles!” Suffragettes with war bonds and prejudices. The gentle twinkling of the city at night savored lone by lovers in the hills, as always. As always, the maggot.

We watched a whole generation march down Main street in olive drab through the eyes of the oldest of our old, a dull pain at how few of them we recognized. How few, and how great the tragedy of their sacrifice. The city was a world itself, with its Bakers and Millers and Joneses and Walshes and Clarks and Wilsons becoming facets of a greater jewel; cosmic problems refracted through the city’s microcosm; archetypes turned to stone in the hot, August sun.

When The Rich sent thousands of The Poor off to become The Dead it was under our maggot flag, the same calling card used by youth leaders and old church functionaries to try and draw us together. For generations we’d slowly grown and, though far from New York or Chicago, we had the chipper, bustling confidence of a twenty-five year old with a race to win. The old wept, and the young blustered. The American dream wasn’t just for individuals, and we’d dreamed ourselves all the way to Europe. Finely etched and nearly-photorealistic maggot likenesses hitched rides on our boys’ supply trucks. Out there in the Belgian muck we came together, even if we couldn’t do so at home anymore. The city was a big place — at least to us. Big enough to make us strangers.

Poor Giovanni stood alongside Rich Mr. Desmarais and mourned the cenotaph of Dead Lester Wilson et al. while protestors swarmed the streets outside. Desmarais, sweating through his three-piece lounge suit, carried a comically large pair of scissors. Today was the dedication to a monument eight years in the making, fuelled by stock market speculation. He considered it quite rude that the city would hold a general strike today of all days — only Giovanni had shown up, and Desmarais didn’t much like Italians. Giovanni was there to read the names and see if they made him feel something. He figured the march could stand to lose one man.

“Did you serve?” Desmarais asked, hadn’t himself. The march sang Now broth-ers of la-bor a-wake to the dawn-ing of. . .

“No, I was — how do you say? Refugee. My brother died at Isonzo.”

“A brave boy.” Desmarais nodded to himself.

Giovanni shrugged. “Maybe.” He looked across the street, past the protestors and the monument to the maggot which sighed as always. A stormcloud, a sleeping god, old news — and still inexplicable to him. Sometimes he’d sit and watch the people of this city walk by, not paying their resident wonder a second thought. Desmarais followed his gaze and saw only fear at the idea of being just as left behind. The buildings had grown to dwarf the maggot several times over. “Maybe,” Giovanni echoed.

. . .no-things grand-er in sto-ry, than life-blood poured out for the cause that is true. . .

Desmarais plugged one ear with a finger in a display of exaggerated annoyance. “They’re tarnishing it. All of this. My solemn occasion for our fallen brothers.”

Giovanni knelt down and read the names, felt the syllables roll around his throat, tried to feel as a piece of us. Feel the we. These were the names that could neither march, nor sneer at the marchers. Sheets of skin sloughed off in sunburn.

“Do you think they’ll keep on?” Desmarais continued.

Giovanni wasn’t sure. He’d come to us and watched the war end, watched The Dead that kept on living come home and sneer at the muddied lines between Rich and Poor, the decadence indulged in the wake of a world that now knew madness.

“Of course they will,” Giovanni said, finding some small satisfaction in the way it made the magnate’s skin pucker. He left him there. Desmarais saw the masses of people not as fellow passengers on the train of history, jumping on and off at stops, but rather as insects to bud Malthusian into a future where their multitudes outnumbered his bank account. He’d later buy three city blocks — including the park containing the maggot, which few cared about protecting anymore — and turn them into a private university. When the stock market crashed and the factories closed down he lived with comfort on the steady tuition of his Rich, foreign students. Wrought iron gates protected them from bread lines and the community of misery that needed them, their manicured gardens and brownstones a little cleaner than those outside. Wars came and went, the maggot-likeness on tanks and then helicopters; each time becoming a little more cartoonish, stylized, idealized, distant.

By 1988 the university had grown over much of the old downtown, gobbling up the brick expanse left behind and unfunded by whites fleeing to the suburbs. Next to its oldest building, at one point its only building, was the maggot. Forgotten alongside parvenu turned old money turned footnotes. We were stuck in the endless interplay of Rich, Poor, and Dead, and how their battlefields had come to our streets and hid themselves behind policing and political action. But it was 1988, and we were freaking ourselves out over the maybe warming world. Again, it was all very far, far away, but enough to stoke the interest of university researchers. They dug up size records for the maggot from way back in the city’s history, finding that it had grown by a similar percentage point to average temperatures around the world. That is to say, very little — but with the promise of a lot more. The Rich sent this information to the other Rich who owned the journals, and it festered in the archives. We founded the Organization for Climate & Maggot Studies at the university, and the world slid into the 90s and the commies fell and history felt like maybe it was over. Ten more years and two collapsed buildings later, that notion died. Our city was bigger and lonelier than ever. Nearly a million of us swarmed around and through the nebulous barriers of our metropolitan soup bowl. We grew so big that even Rich, Poor, and Dead were too sentimental. When one asked another who they were, they most often replied with a job title.

. . .fol-low him! Our blood-y cross-es em-brace!. . .

4.

The metropolis. 2030. November. Fall a little hotter and the coke drip of gentrification, call the HOA! The icebergs melt. Teenagers again roll revolution round their lips like marbles, feel the shape, the necessary curve. Shiny brick facades and another almost war, perpetually almost and always. The river that floods more often. Rolling blackouts (not yet). The precipice, lovers on hills, ants on eggshells — far too late, smoggy sunset saccharine. The towers, so many towers, how far we’ve come. How low. No names on Main Street anymore. The toiling and the mining, bricks from avalanches, and all the dust and petty squabbles and all the while the world is ending and no one knows our names. The we of annihilation. History, blind-choking.

What were her final thoughts? When the flames licked around the corners of her eyes, cutting up, up, up; when the skin charred and the nerves fried and the point of no return was passed, was she afraid? We wondered. Oh, we wondered, all truth of that self-immolation lost in the wake of our collective reaction to it. Ophelia Clark-Nguyen was a graduate student working for the climate think-tank, OCMS, and then she was a martyr, burning herself alive along with the headquarters of an energy conglomerate downtown. The OCMS published a new report on the maggot’s growth. The sickness of the world was undeniable. She couldn’t take it. Later, with hindsight, many would wonder if it all could’ve been avoided. But we were old by then. Old before. Old like the maggot was, grey and splotched and taken for granted. Nothing lives forever.

Far away the coral reefs died all at once. A continent burned. A new hurricane swept through before those distant others could rebuild from the last, and all we could do was laugh. Bluster. Pretend it wouldn’t touch us. Fathers passed masks down to suns. We watched our metropolis grow and voted in elections and ate organic food. For a while these had seemed like progress; now more like rituals, cleaning our shrines and washing our feet in the face of. . .what? We watched — some of us supported — the harsh measures being tested around the nation. Massive sea walls around New York and Miami. Isolationist rhetoric. We declared ourselves a sanctuary city and dueled with ICE, play-sword fighting for the day when the refugee crises would add another order of magnitude. The Scientists at the university talked about divestment because no one would listen to solutions. The unskilled held bachelor’s degrees. The Soldiers prepared to defend our global suicide — yes, we were global, the world was everywhere and so nowhere, and nobody knew our names.

The whole city might’ve burned if not for the historic flood that accompanied Ophelia’s martyrdom. Three feet of water blanketed the ground, and the headquarters crumbled. The fire department couldn’t get close enough. So many of us hated her. Loved her. Cried for her. And soon the world saw, and soon the world came — flocking to the metropolis because, in stressful times, few can resist a focal point. The maggot’s likeness graced the signs and graffiti of the Protestors who filled downtown and camped and quarreled with Soldiers. Months of cold-hard conflict ambled out and froze like dead tobacco stalks. All our throats burned with shouting, with a purpose for once. Around the nation, another pandemic raged and more innocents were killed and our singular, directed anger turned to an intersectional crusade. We were pissed. Unwilling to lie down, unwilling to die. Both Protestor and Soldier saw the little war in the metropolis as a microcosm of the whole thing — maybe how it was resolved here would be how it was resolved everywhere.

The Soldiers saw it as a tamed beast. The Protestors, a symbol of resistance. The Scientists, an omen. For years the maggot watched and the protests dragged on, waning with despair and waxing with anger at every new crisis, every new oppression, every new hopeless lashing out of the we who were oh, so very tired. A series of unprecedented floods in South America roused the sleeping beasts in Washington. A national emergency was declared and they began a campaign to accompany immigrants to the border, and the flames were stoked and buildings burned and Protestors were shot and the president warned the governor who warned the mayor to control our metropolis before he had to. The mayor, a descendant of Hiawatha and Walsh and Desmarais, refused. The president cut all federal funding to the metropolis and the mayor refused, again.

The national news talked about the metropolis as if it were in open revolt and so that’s the narrative we settled on. The Soldiers laid siege and many fled. Soon after, Protestors from around the country massed behind the blockade, sneaking food and supplies to those left inside. These days were filled with rolling blackouts and hunger. The university suspended classes. Almost everyone left. Our population fell back to one barely befitting the title of “town.” And yet it was the first time we’d felt like a community in centuries. These pockets of humanity sprung up alongside wildflower brambles through holes in bombed out concrete. All the labels that had divided us melted away in the face of our mission, letting police officers dine with the remnants of communities they once victimized, and art flourish on the grey walls that didn’t mean anything anymore, and the gallows humor bud and rise to genuine enjoyment, filling the throats of those who knew they would fail but could not gently wither. We welcomed our candlelit eulogies, repeated each night as we waited for death. We lived as symbols to the wider world, individuals for once, and family to each other. Then the day came and shooting broke out on the bridge again, and the soldiers stormed the city and eradicated all evidence of our tumble through the centuries, forcing everyone out to death or imprisonment, making everyone leave, making an example out of us to all the other old cities with new ideas. As always, the maggot. Cracked and sagging now, and breathing, and bigger than before; its curves grown through the wrought iron gates, rubble and overturned earth on its back. The Soldiers broke the roads and salted the fields of Carthage. The metropolis was declared a historical site in a fit of cosmic irony, and few were allowed inside anymore. We knew the real reason why, the four of us stuck up in that cracked old room, the last ones left. We knew the reason and we held to it as we tried to hold onto each other, and finally we knew our names again.

5.

The ruin. 2045. February. Mason. Liam. Zoe. Ava. Sleet rain on plate glass in the little room on the top floor and no lights, not one, nothing but sleeping sunset/waking sunrise. Solar-rigged griddles with sizzling bean cakes, the last of the scavenge, the worst best thing we’ve ever eaten. The maggot below us. Our obsession, our anchor, our favorite ashy zeppelin. Takes us nowhere. No internet, three months. Nothing but leaflets — ordnance, unexploded. The soot-streaked coffee pot and the instant that’s running low and our careers? Never spoken of, minds endlessly putting off the question. We have our names and the soil is gone. We, the ticks on the back of the shaggy dog, the old pretending to be the new, huddled together for warmth at the end of everything.

On a cold and middling Tuesday morning we woke in our vast cocoon of blankets and clothing and frost. We only had the rain to contend with when we moved in, but soon the ice collected, wisps through chipping concrete. The grey sunrise roused us. We sat up and stretched the cold from our bones, falling wordlessly into our morning chores and rituals — coffee and cooking and tidying the cots and writing in journals. Most shared the same pattern, months of studious research notes written in fine gel pen shifting suddenly to a hurried scribble of daily life, written with whatever could be found. Doodles of the maggot were interspersed evenly throughout. In the beginning it was sigil, a word to power. By the end it was elegy.

We had our own peculiar way that we’d settled into, like most families. Mason was up and doting before anyone else had finished their coffee. He smiled through the burned skin on his face to each of us before he stomped around, setting our room to rights. He had at least a foot and fifty pounds on all of us. Liam offered to help but knew Mason wouldn’t accept it. We knew this dance; Liam already had his toolbox, anyway. He was itching to go.

“I’ll have to rig up some kind of dishwasher to run off the solar,” Liam said, his green eyes distant and wondering, peering across that crooked nose of his. “I’ll be done with the car soon.”

And then he nodded and we knew he didn’t expect a response. Zoe asked for a hug before he left, and he groaned and then finally relented but we all knew he savored that part of the ritual. She watched the door a while after he left, and we each wondered if she did so longer for each of us, individually.

“I wonder how our friend’s doing today,” Zoe said.

“Same as forty years ago,” Ava said. Her wispy, grey curls fell on the shoulders of her tattered lab coat. The “Phd” on her name tag had long since been scratched to a Rorschach glyph.

Zoe got up from our table and wandered to the window, dragging a blanket bride’s train behind her, then gathering it up into a bustle as she sat down cross legged in front of it. She stuck her nose to the glass.

“Isn’t it so much nicer now,” Zoe said.

“We’re living like rats. I don’t have a clean shirt, let alone funding for my research. It’s all fucked. So, no. I don’t think so,” Ava said.

A metallic croak as Mason opened a can of who-knows-what. The professor’s desk was now a makeshift kitchen. “Now, Ms. Ava,” he said, “It’s not so bad. We’re alive and that’s more than many can say.”

Ava closed her eyes, letting the chipped coffee cup linger at her lips. Zoe scribbled a poem in her notebook. Mason hummed.

“It’s a purer life. I don’t miss the traffic. Or having to make money. Or having to go to class. Right, Mason?” Zoe said.

“I like helping y’all a lot more than I liked Biodiversity II, that’s for sure.”

“You were a bad student,” Ava said.

“Yes I was.”

Ava got up and looked out the window from far in the back of the room. She shook her head, then walked out without saying anything.

“She’s just upset that we aren’t obsessed with it like she is,” Zoe said.

“I ‘spose it brought us together. Doesn’t mean it has to consume us,” Mason decided.

“Mmm.”

Zoe continued to discover her poem and Mason continued cooking and Ava dragged recovered sensors out to the maggot and Liam worked on the car. Eventually Zoe finished and added it to her pile by the window, a shrine of little treasures and words she knew nobody would ever read. Strands of her long, black hair wove through them like signatures, the gentle lavender scent of the shampoo she hoarded accompanying. Mason finished at a predictable time and we gathered for lunch, Liam acting modest about his progress so as not to jinx how close he was. Ava didn’t say much beyond reporting that the rain had turned to ice and froze some sludge to the back of the maggot. Every time it breathed it cracked.

Our family persisted with their endeavors for the rest of the day, unaware of how unaware we were, right until Liam started the car up for the first time and turned on its radio around 7 p.m. He soon wished he’d never hesitated to return Zoe’s goodbyes.

Liam burst into the room after climbing the moldy stairs up all five stories in a sprint.

“They’ve been planning it for months!” he yelled.

Everyone else was sitting around the table, getting ready for Mason’s second offering of the day. “What are you talking about?” Ava asked.

“Get some dinner before it gets cold,” Mason said.

“Screw dinner, they’re gonna kill it.”

Forks and cups and faces froze where they were. Liam refused to sit, pacing around the room in that anxious, spasmic stride of his. He explained how he fixed the car. How when he turned on the radio a newscaster was talking about how the “redevelopment” plan was initiating Step One day after tomorrow. How they were going to destroy the maggot to prevent it from becoming a Symbol for Terrorists. How they had to bulldoze the city. Start anew. “It’s over. We have to leave,” Liam finished.

The words sat miasmic over dinner. Mason’s eyes welled. “What do we do?” he asked.

“We have to leave,” Liam said.

Zoe stood sharply. “And what? Go back to living in that hell world we barely escaped? In some other nameless metropolis? What’s the difference?”

Liam paced faster and faster. “We have to leave. We have a car. We have to leave.”

Mason’s hands shook. “I don’t. . .want to. . .”

The castrophany of emotion rose and rose till Ava cut it back with surgical finality. “Tomorrow. We’ll figure it out in the morning. There’s nothing we can do now but gather our research and our things and figure it out in the morning.”

Dinner was left to frost over on the table; no one lit any candles. We laid down in our cots shortly after but soon grew restless. Each one of us was intimately aware of the others’ breathing. Mason sniffled until Zoe got up to console him. Liam walked out the door and paced his grief away down the hallways. Ava just laid there, staring at the dirty ceiling the same color as the maggot. She knew she only had so long to look. When we’d each cried it out in our own ways we fell asleep, peaceless and tumbling like the night before a long journey. Or the last day of the universe.

Wednesday came with a deluge of fog and all of us woke before sunrise. Under the watch of Mason’s giant hands, the last of our coffee percolated: a bubbling, bitter, heated security blanket. We rose slower than usual. The fog was black-grey and turbulent, twisting under currents outside. Zoe wondered what it’d be like to swim in it, and Ava looked out at the chernobylesque skyline suggested by rods of white concrete peeking out of the roiling mist — to her they were monoliths. Like she’d woken up one day and the city she loved had turned to something like stonehenge, and she could no longer pretend to know why it was there or even how. We sipped in silence as sunrise crept up, and Zoe was the first one to spot it, with her nose flush against the window.

“It’s gone,” she said, so calm it was barely a whisper.

“What?” Ava rushed to the precipice. Then the rest of us. The coming sun had cut the fog and now was washing it away, revealing only absence. Where the maggot had sat unmoving for almost three hundred years there was now only an empty plot of soil, interspersed with black dots we couldn’t identify from all the way up here. The silence stunned us for long enough that the rest of the fog dispersed.

“Did they come early?” Mason asked.

“Do you think we’d miss a bombing? It disappeared,” Ava said.

“I can’t believe we missed it,” Zoe trailed off.

Liam turned away. “It’s over. We already knew that.”

We gathered our things and funeral marched down the five flights of stairs, doing so together for the first time since we’d found each other after Death Day so many months ago. We piled into Liam’s car. The musty staleness of it. The crinkling of winter coats. The forced closeness of it all and the real closeness we were leaving behind. Liam pulled out of the garage and started to drive away.

“Wait,” Zoe said, “Pull up by the m — the field. I want to see it up close. One last time.”

She looked to the rest of us, bracing for dissent. None came. Liam drove the car up with hearse-like slowness. We got out, slamming the doors behind us with an echo only winter could provide.

“Are those plants?” Liam asked.

In front of them was a furrowed field plucked out of history. Undisturbed. There was no evidence of the maggot having ever been there, nothing beyond the rows and rows of dead tobacco stalks, black and slashed as if only a few months had passed. The soil was rich and brown like ochre, like coffee in an expanse of granulate that might as well never end.

“Wow,” Mason said. Everyone echoed him. “What now?”

Ava fell to her knees and dug her fingernails into the dirt. “I don’t understand.”

Liam shrugged. “I guess. I guess, yeah. We leave. Find something else.”

“I just don’t understand,” Ava chanted.

“We don’t have to find something else if we don’t want to,” Zoe said.

Mason put his hand on her shoulder. “The army’s coming, Ms. Zoe. I don’t think we can stay.”

“No, I mean — we say it’s for the maggot but really it’s for. . .like you said. That’s how it ended up. I don’t give a fuck about the maggot. The maggot doesn’t mean anything. We don’t have to split up when we get out of the ruins. Fuck the maggot. We can stay together.”

Ava kept repeating her phrase: I ju — underst — I just don’t. . .

Liam leaned back on the car and crossed his arms. “What can we do?”

“Drive. Together. Do a bit of perfectly average, familial improvising.”

The word family floated in the air.

“I suppose?” Mason asked.

“Why not?” Zoe echoed.

Whether through a fear of the unknown or a love for each other Liam and Zoe and Mason got back into the car. Ava didn’t budge. Or respond. Mason tried desperately to get her out of the dirt, promising that she didn’t have to go with us, but to “please let us take you out of the ruins.” She wouldn’t. We left her behind.

We drove for many days, subsisting on scraps and scroungings. Outside of the ruin the world puttered on, but when we’d driven for long enough we could almost forget that. Almost. At the border to a great forest we stopped at the last gas station to resupply. We didn’t plan on coming back out after we went in. We threw open our car doors once again and stepped out into the parking lot, stretching lactic acid from our muscles into the cold, February night. Lying in front of the car was a small, blood-red pile of dirt. We bent down together to examine it, finding three, wriggling maggots hidden inside, the LED lights above shimmering against their bodies like candlelight on fine silk.

The Maggot originally appeared in Volume 65 of Spectrum Literary Journal.