(047)
All at once it was time, and the singular focus that had driven him since the moment that he’d been born disappeared, suddenly replaced with something new:
Hide.
His light receptors barely detect the faint signals in the darkness, guiding him from the depths through the tunnels that had shaped his existence. He wriggles past his brothers and sisters – most still working diligently, even as his own work had come to an end – making his way up the criss-crossing network that he’d built with them to what lies ahead.
The signal grows stronger, but his pace remains the same: a slow crawl towards the pinprick of light at the surface. The question of “why?” doesn’t enter his mind, nor does he seek its answer. He simply knows it is what must be done. Restless energy demands that he move, so he moves.
The pinprick grows before his eyes until it is all that he can see, and then he breaches the surface. His skin glistens as he emerges, with only his head protruding, relishing the sensation of a gentle breeze for the first time. Yet, he doesn’t stop to bask, and with two more exertions he squeezes through the exit, tumbling down to land in the spot that would mark his last connection to his childhood.
Flies buzz around him, searching for the perfect place, which may no longer be where he lay – in the hollow eye socket of a fox, long since eaten by him and his siblings. A grey, writhing dust has weaved itself within the red and white fur. Ants form a ceaseless conveyor belt, ferrying fragments to their nest to nourish their young, while fungi steadily encroach, enveloping the remains.
None of this concerns the maggot, however.
He unceremoniously tips himself from the bony ridge and drops, spinning without grace to land in the dirt. The bustling, lively setting he’d come from wouldn’t work for what he needed to do, so he slinks off into the patch of multi-coloured wildflowers, jutting out in stark refusal of the ashen dirt beneath them. A nondescript spot calls to him, and once he reaches it he begins to dig, brushing the dirt left and right with his head and burying himself just beneath the surface.
With the singular focus that had driven him here now satisfied, a new one takes its place:
Wait.
So he waits.
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