bodies, flies, death

A faint smell is all that remains, the smell of pain, a dull metallic sensation, and the flies. The flies cover us and fill the air so thick that breathing carries the prospect of feeding and choking on flies.

We eat them. They eat us. We eat ourselves.

The flies blanket every surface including our own. Slowly, they peck, they rub, the break down the skin they live upon. Flies cover our eyes, pass in and out of our mouth, course in and out of our nose, fill our ears. I am blind and deaf. I know I am not alone. I can feel others living around me, but I cannot see, hear, or smell them. The dulled sensation of body collisions, the vibration of walking, coughing, an ever present silence of voice. We were remnants, and quickly we were all dying. We were starving, sapped of strength, sickened by exposure, and worn down to a grim, unseen form by the countless flies.

Bodies were everywhere. Sometimes I stepped on one. Sometimes rotted bodies exploded hot gasses on us. This stirred the flies into a cyclonic frenzied mass, which we felt in our bodies as a tone, a hum, sonic vibration. The sound resonated off my chest. And I accompanied the flies to the feast.

We were remnants; this was the end. For months we languished on this rock in the middle of a sea that was now teeming with an older remnant of our world. It had destroyed our world in a quick invasion that could have been centuries in the unfolding. Maybe it simply occurred over the course of the few days it took from first spotting them to being here on this rock amid a flooded earth. These mollusks, descendants of the octopi that still lived in our oceans, returned to their ancestral home--the old, deep oceans--to reclaim their spawning ground . They were preparing our world to be theirs. Before, we were survivors on a desolate rock in the middle of the ocean, under the blazing sun, using our clothing to protect the carpet of still-extant mountain lichens upon which we fed.

Then, we suffered. Now, we barely remain, here on this mountain top that now meets the crashing sea of a flooded world.

I pay a dear price for survival. We began eating our remains. The bodies of the dead. We ate them where they laid without any ritual formalities. Weeks of hunger and exposure had reduced my body to a cage of determined existence hidden under a blanket of flies and pain. In hunger I ate all of my words and my ability to speak them. I don't know my name. The body next to me once had a name that I knew. It still shifts about next to me, disrupting the shattered pile of bones. Neither of us utters a noise. It would not be heard over the rhythmic drone of fly wings. Hunger had long since forced us to conserve our energy. Our minds were sacrificed to the needs of nutrition. The dead brought sustenance to us all. Then the flies began to compete for our existence. As they multiplied so did our suffering.