the_siobhan | Wee Fly Babies: story #2 (Reply)

So about those maggots.

I used to go to pagan festivals a lot. On this one occasion I was packing up to go to a pagan festival with my boyfiend of the time - let's call him L. I had a big storage closet where all my camping gear was kept and after digging my tent and sleeping bags out of storage, for whatever reason I decided to toss my partially-filled bag of garbage in there for safe keeping.

I figure I must have had a good reason at the time. I know I had mice, maybe I thought I would be less likely to find it all over the apartment when I returned. I do know that I couldn't put it outside because the neighbourhood is full of very aggressive and well-fed racoons, it wouldn't have lasted a day. Anyway, we were only going to be away for about five days so I didn't worry about it.

Got real hot that week.

Y'all can tell where this is going, right?

Anyway, back from the festival five days later, I opened the storage closet, pulled out the bag -- thinking to myself "That's gotten kind of nasty, must remember to double-bag that in the morning" -- tossed my camping gear inside and went to bed.

Morning comes. I wake up to a full bladder and sunlight streaming through the bedroom window. I pad to the bathroom and then to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. I'm walking back into the bedroom to grab a dressing gown, and as I walk into the room L is reaching out and picking up his jeans from where he tossed them on the floor the previous night.

I would never have spotted it in lower lighting, but with the bright sunlight turning everything into technicolour, I could swear I saw something dropping to the floor as he picked up his clothes.

"What's that on your clothes?" I asked, and we both squinted at the floor.

"AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!"

We both simultaneously jumped up onto the bed.

It didn't take long to figure out what had happened. The night before I had disturbed what had been a pretty healthy colony and they had gone searching for more peaceful digs. When the hot sun started coming in the window in the morning, they all headed for shade.

I gingerly picked up my t-shirt from where it had been lying and gave it a gentle shake. Yep. Covered.

Then we looked under the bed.

"AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!"

I was really lucky that I had hardwood floors. And that it was a bright warm day. I did a daring leap from the bed and ran over to the dresser to get some clean non-infested clothes. L managed to pull something out of his laundry bag. The rest of the clothes got scooped into a bag and tossed directly into the clothes washer.

The next step after quadruple-bagging the garbage and was to run out to the store and buy massive quantities of cleaners and disinfectants. L flat out refused to help me so I dropped him and his camping gear off at his apartment, hit the store and then bombed back home.

There's this intersection, see. And I turned left on it every single time I drove along that street. But I don't drive every day, so I didn't notice that they had put up a "no left hand turns" sign since last time. Apparently a lot of people didn't notice, because there was a policeman sitting around the corner pulling people over one by one. He pulled me over.

I looked at him, said, "I am having a really really crappy day. My apartment is full of maggots." and burst into tears.

He wrote me a ticket.

I went home. I moved every single piece of furniture in my entire apartment. I swept and scrubbed every inch of the floor. It took me the entire day.

I bought a fly-swatter. I killed every fly I saw and tried not to think about where it might have come from.

And I paid that fucking ticket.