Well friends and haters,
I had somebody on reddit suggest I post some short stories... Here's one I wrote a couple weeks ago after I got swarmed by flies while stirring my compost.
I guess the genre would be... Gross out horror? I dunno. Purely fiction, I hope you enjoy!!!
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| "On the Fly" illustrated by the author |
"On the Fly"
By Alex Maria
The cyclist mopped away the sheen with the back of his arm- which was by now, more sweat than skin and hence no good for mopping. Sweat continued to drip off his brow and sting his eyes.
Twigs and leaves crunched under his wheels, as he coasted to a stop.
He fanned his shirt. It was hot as balls outside, almost too hot to bike- but this was the last day of his Adirondack vacation with his three closest friends, so it was his last chance to get out on these trails before he went back to the city.... He knew if he didn't take the time he'd regret it.
He loved the outdoors, but hardly ever got to enjoy them between work and school.
The only thing he didn't like about being out in the woods was the bugs- the flies especially. If there weren't things to crawl on him or land on him, he'd probably give away all his shit and just live in some bushes.
Well that was a fantasy, and a foolish one, to be the Mowgli or Tarzan of the Northeastern United States... But the truth was that the woods held a certain sacred appeal, atleast for him.
The cyclist pawed again at his t shirt, and found a dry-ish spot to wipe his face. At least it got the sting out of his eyes, if only for the moment.
His mouth was that bitter kind of dry that made spit feel viscous and tacky. He licked his lips but his tongue was like dry paper, and that brought no satisfaction.
He pulled one of the water bottles off the cross bar of the bike and relished in its glory. If one were thirsty enough, even warm, stale, plasticky water could be a certain kind of ecstasy.
He breathed deep. His blood was still pumping nicely so his senses were fully awake. The air was clean and pure, and the forest tittered and spoke. Birds winged back and forth calling for mates, and a chipmunk scuttled across the psuedo-path he'd been biking.
It was a deer run actually, just barely wide enough for him and his bicycle. He looked at his legs and arms, they were veiny and full from the exercise. He felt powerful, wild, and free.
It was good to be in nature, it was good to be panting from exertion. A gentle breeze wandered through the trees and it reminded him of the feeling he’d had moments prior, when he’d been really moving and grooving and the air had been whipping past his face and through his hair.
He wanted to feel that again, so he holstered the bottle and hit the pedals.
A smile bloomed on his face as the mountain bike’s frame heaved back and forth with each pump, propelling him further and faster through the wooded stretch.
Occasionally the bushes would thin out enough that he could tear away from the deer run and zip between heavy and ancient trees.
It was good.
He pedaled up a steady climb and coasted down the other side, gliding and guiding the bike, the wind massaged his face and scalp like a thousand tiny fingers.
It was really good.
He let his momentum carry him up another hill. At the top, he braked to a stop.
The sun was still shining but it would be making its decent in two or three hours. He had already been biking for two, which meant he’d better head back soon or he'd be biking in the dark. The woods almost became unnavigable after dark, and there was always the irrational fear of crazy axe murderers or the rational fear of bears to offer him preference for the light of day.
Still, he was not satisfied. He wanted the joy of the ride to last longer. So he allotted himself thirty more minutes- thirty minutes tops.
And at the turn of the thirteenth of those thirty-tops minutes, a fat black fly landed on his arm.
He brushed it away in absolute disgust. Flies were a bit of a phobia of his, though he never would have admitted that in front of any of his buddies... or in front of any girls for that matter.
He wasn't good with bugs in general, but flies he deemed exceptionally vile and revolting. When he was a kid he had climbed into a dumpster, for fun. It hadn't ended up being anywhere near as fun as he had hoped it to be, and he had cursed himself for his curiosity.
He remembered it so vividly that it brought a frown to his face and a flush of nausea to his stomach.
The sickly sweet smell of the rubbish had hung in the air like a blanket. It had been bad, but not as bad as the sound his feet had made when they had hit the bottom of the dumpster... A horrible squish on top of a metallic thud. He had looked down and questioned his own sight as a hallucination. The floor had seemed to be wriggle and pulse. He had stooped to look closer and had seen he was standing on hundreds of tiny white things. Individual, horrible white things.
His horror magnified, but he had been transfixed as he watched them squirm and roll all over each other.
Suddenly he had became aware of their subtle odor, which lay underneath that thicker layer offered by the liquefied table scraps and garbage juice. It was like fish and worms and slime, and it had caught him off guard. Once he noticed it, it had lost all subtlety and started overpowering his senses.
He became able to taste them on the air, then he also became acutely aware of just how small the dumpster space was.
He had felt the contents of his stomach preparing to make a break for it, but he had stifled that powerful urge, and looked for a hand hold to climb back out.
That’s when he had noticed there were alo maggots on the walls. Some climbed, some stuck, and others fell from their perches like putrid rain. He couldn't see a clean hand hold, but he couldn't stay in the surprise hell in which he found himself. He had reached out and tried to climb, but had born strong personal objection to the smoosh of them under his palm and fingers.
He hadn't known just how long he stood in the middle of that dumpster crying, screaming, and freaking out whenever he felt something brush against the open toes in his sandals, but eventually his mom had found him and hauled him out.
She had hosed him off and spent a good twenty minutes picking fetid white pellets out of his hair, (God only knew how they got there) while he had cried wallowing tears under the intensity of his trauma.
When he had learned that maggots grew into flies, he developed an instant, intense hatred for them as well.
Two more landed on his other arm, breaking into his thoughts with the here and now- his heart thudded against his chest, that wasn’t a memory he enjoyed revisiting. It made him feel trapped, helpless, and overwhelmed.
He lashed out and batted away the flies which had found purchase on his arm, the bike swerved but remained under his control.
Wind.
Wind would keep the dirty, little, winged vermin off of him. He pedaled hard, and immediately regretted it. They were smacking into his arms, chest, and face like tiny disease carrying kamikazes.
He stopped the bike and looked around- it was as though he had bicycled into the eye of a fly-hurricane. There were hundreds all over the place, peppering the trees and the leaves on the ground. They shaded the area, and clouded his vision. Their buzzing created a low droning ambient noise. He could hear them landing on the leaves and twigs around him, like rain drops- and the entire area smelled likely badly spoiled meat- the same kind of smell drivers grimace at when passing a messy splotch of not-so-fresh roadkill.
Three landed on his left arm, four on his right, he could feel them through the sweat-drenched shirt on his back, and on his bare neck.
A loud buzz- he felt land near the opening of his ear. He cringed away, and swatted at his ear.
Another buzzed against his nostril, his panic exploded and he threw the bike into frantic motion.
He worried that they were following him, but believed he could outrun the little buggers. He had to cling to that belief because he could hear their relentless buzzing right behind him, and whether that merciless storm of noise was real or imagined, it had to be escaped. He envisioned a cloud of twitching segmented legs, nagging wings, and hairy antennae; he imagined them landing on his face and in his hair- searching for his eyes.
His panic reached a sharp crescendo, he biked harder and faster, clinging to the belief that he could out last them. That eventually they’d give up the chase.
He pedaled wildly and at last came to a brake-screeching, chest-heaving stop; ‘thirty minutes tops’ was somewhere in the past, feasting on his dust, the way the flies were feasting on that dead dear or whatever rank thing it was that he had ridden past.
He cocked an ear and began to breathe a sigh of relief but it caught in his dry throat. He heard a buzzing. He nearly fell of his seat when he saw the biggest fly ever to taint the air with its segmented repugnance, but then let that caught up sigh escape when he realized what it was he truly saw… only a big black carpenter bee. Oddly enough, those did not bother him. Probably because they ate nectar instead of poo, and generally ignored passersby.
He had escaped.
But where the hell was he?
He had abandoned the little deer run without a second thought, and now found himself in the middle of a patch of wild roses in an area he did not recognize.
He looked down at his knuckles, suddenly aware they were aching and stinging.
The hooked thorns of those wild roses were the culprit, passive though they were. His hands were torn to shreds, and his legs were even worse.
He had a vague awareness that he had been biking through the rose bushes full throttle. He had been fueled by adrenaline and had given the roses not the slightest notice.
They, in turn, had not given his bare skin the slightest chance. He winced and pulled one of the hook shaped thorns out of his middle finger.
Worth it, if that’s what it took to outrun those skeevy little bastard flies.
He thought again about how many there were. The dead animal which made that stench must have been large, because there was a disgustingly huge population of flies subsisting off of its poor carcass.
And they had been landing all over his face and arms. Those little hooked feet had been clawing through congealed blood and bloated animal remains, and they had crawled all over him.
What kind of animal would have been big enough to feed such a huge swarm of flies? A deer? A coyote? Maybe a bear. The image of mottled fur, dampened by rain and decay- all gassy and soggy- was too disgusting to bear. He could practically see the animals rotted out cheeks, and clenched yellow teeth. Practically see the voids in its skull where its eyes had once been.
He shuddered.
Suddenly he felt very hot, and a wave of nausea washed over him. He had to get moving, he was burning day light fast. And those bloody crisscrosses on his hands and legs might attract the unwanted attention of the winged-filth, even at this distance.
Though he was lost, he had a vague idea of his location, an idea which clarified as his panic receded. If he back tracked he could find his bearings with little difficulty, but that would require passing through Fly Kingdom, and that was utterly out of the question.
He could start off in the general direction of the cabin he and his friends had been staying at, but it might get dark while he went, and without a path to follow that would be risky. He knew that the property he was biking on ran along a road, and having up driven up the road with his friends on the way to the cabin and out to town a handful of times.
The first matter was expediting his exit from the brambles in which he was now entwined.
He chose his steps strategically using his shoes to pin thorny branches at their base or pushing them aside with his bike; wincing at the occasional snag, now felt without the sensory armor of an adrenal rush.
And then he was out, and it was a short trip through a stretch of trees which looked like big inverted tentacles in the dying light. He heard a vehicle churning gravel, it was distant but it gave him a perfect indication of the direction of the road. He moved forward with renewed confidence.
By the time he found the road, darkness had embraced the land, and the smooth gravel looked almost like a frozen river.
But he knew the road wasn’t as smooth as it appeared in the dim. There would be no way to identify and avoid snags, pits, and fallen branches in the darkness of the night.
He decided to walk the bike form that point on.
It didn't bother him though. In fact he felt pretty good about having found the road on his own. There had always been the looming probability of him getting turned around in the woods and having to fulfill his fantasy of sleeping in the shrubbery, but upon finding the road, he was guaranteed a direct path to a much needed shower and a no-fly-zone in which to steal some sleep.
But first, he planned to scrub-a-dub-dub for a good hour and a half, just to make certain that every single trace of material left by the flies would be washed away in a flood of soap and hot water.
He heard the crunching sound of wheels on dirt road, and moved off to the side, clear off the gravel and into the grassy ditch which ran along the road. It was dark, he wasn't wearing high visibility clothing, and he didn't want to risk getting hit.
He watched the headlights slice through the trees and come around the bend washing light across the road.
It was a police cruiser.
It pulled past him the officer at the wheel oblivious to his presence.
But there was a face in the back window, that seemed all to aware- pressed up against the glass.
It was dark, but not too dark see the haggered and sunken eyes, staring out at him. His breath held and a chill forced its way down his spine.
The face was drawn in a mirthless sneer, it conveyed all the hate, violence, and evil, of a demoniac. And the eyes, deepset and hollow, seemed to be directed at him, though he told himself (desperately) that was a product of low visibility and an overactive imagination.
He also told himself, that the man in the cruiser could not possibly have been smiling. That was just shadow play, which his mind tried to make sense of.
His heart thudded against his rib cage, and he was suddenly very afraid of the dark which encroached upon from all sides. He mounted his bike and took off in the direction of the cabin he and his friends had rented, which was coincidentally the same direction that the cop car had gone. His trail followed the distant glow of semi-sinister red tail lights.
He hit a bump here and there, but nothing large enough to throw him off his seat, and the road finally took him back to the house.
He found his friends gathered in the common area, seated around an empty fire place that would have been roaring, if the weather had been Winter. They had flash lights in their hands and worried expressions on their faces, which melted into relief at the sight of him.
"Were have you been bud? We were just about to head out looking for you."
He told them the full story: the flies, the roses (Showing of his battle scars as he spoke), and the face in the dark; all between mouthfuls of cool water and whatever left overs he could scrounge from the dinner he’d missed.
“They probably picked him up on drug charges.” Joked one of his friends, about the man in the back of the cruiser, "I've heard of Meth-cookers making camps up here in the mountains, you know.”
With them- in the cabin- he felt safe, secure, and comfortable; the man in the back of the cruiser became far less unsettling.
The shower was bliss, though it stung the gouges on his hands and feet, the hot water worked relaxation into his soar, tension worn muscles.
Climbing into bed was like slipping into a warm cocoon of safety and comfort. He slept very well and awoke to a knock at the door, which was unexpected to say the least.
He came to the front of the house, where his friends had already opened the door.
It was a police officer, which was the exclamation point at the end of their surprise.
He noticed a number of patrol vehicles parked on the road leading to the house, and saw blue uniformed men and women moving through the trees, as though they were conducting the beginnings of a methodical search.
The officer at the door bore a grim countenance. "Last night we arrested one suspect in an ongoing investigation. The arrested man made a full confession, and claimed full responsibility; he said he disposed of the bodies in the surrounding area. We are going to be combing the area for a few days, and would ask that you avoid the hills above this house until we leave. If you have noticed anything that might aid us in our investigation…"
The officer went on talking, but the cyclist was too floored to hear what was said. The man he’d seen arrested last night was an active killer? And he’d been lost at night in the woods near his property?
He realized that if things had happened just a bit differently he might have been one of those “recently disposed of” bodies.
Then another thought occurred to him and he started to get a little bit queasy. The sound of the flies buzzing filled the space between his ears, and caused an ache at the base of his skull.
It dawned on him with sickening realization, and his body solved that queasiness problem the old fashioned way: his stomach gave the old heave-ho and last nights leftovers came out to say hello.
His friends flinched away from the spray, and he did his best to direct it off the porch, luckily nobody caught any. Then they crowded around and assaulted his unhearing ears with “Are you ok?”, and “What the hell dude?” and the like.
He could feel them all over again, hundreds of little six legged beasts landing all over him, and crawling. Their legs cool and wet with drippings of decaying-.
The thought was too horrible.
The officer, who had been cut off, was eyeing him with a look of uncertainty.
“I… I…” He stammered, and mustered his courage.
He had to tell someone about the flies once more… He had a feeling it might point the officers in the right direction.
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If you enjoyed this short story and my writing style, check out my other short story, "The Power of the Dollar," or my book, Harold and Emily Were Meant To Be! It's free to read on my blog, and the next chapter will be coming soon!
