Sex Maggots

Masturbating with butterflies, glossing lips with liquid from the bottom of pitcher-plant cups, Thalia Hawthorne had few worries in her sun-filled living other than fashion and formication and fornication, which were all the same thing. Today's central concern: which crushed flowers to rub on her inner wrists, what ultraviolet patterns for the fabric around her lap, what flavor honey to anoint her loins, all to encourage crawling up her skirts.

As it was the beginning of swarming season, she and Silvanus were experimenting with new combinations to attract pollinators. "Have we done something wrong?" Silvanus fretted. "Where are all the eligibles?" None of the usual pollen wasps alighted on his outthrust hips, and only a few insectile legs tickled the insides of Thalia's thighs, disappointingly. A flowering youth like her should be positively covered in them, but there were fewer and fewer inquisitive insects every season.

Thalia threw open the upper-story window and leaned out. The cobbled streets clattered with coach, carriage, and cart traffic. "It's too early yet for travelers to bring fresh swarms, but there are still many eager specimens in our area waiting to meet us." She swung herself onto the sill, feet dangling outside, skirts bunched up to her knees, legs apart. "In fact, here comes one now."

Down the street, Parker Beaman all a-walking, tall-thin as a reed and pale as cotton. Recent growing seasons had been good to him. However his once-fine beard of bees, most often so thick and golden-brown, looked much reduced and patchy. The drones and workers animated his features but obscured his true feelings.

Thalia brushed a painted lady from her plaits, held it trembling on one finger, and blew it softly in Parker's direction. It crossed the distance, attracted to his smell and coloration, and poked into the open vent of his trenchcoat to sample his stalk, then flew back to nest on Thalia, having tasted neither plague nor pox on him. A few of his bees followed to touch her petals.

"He's a compatible companion, but something's amiss," she said. "I hope it's not melancholia."

"Better that than colony collapse," said Silvanus. "What's a life after all without some bustle in the bush?" He said this to make a weary mockery of himself: all month, since Spring sprung, his sleep-dizzy wasps had ranged far, every dusk fewer had returned, and no strangers' had come with back them. Silvanus and Thalia were close as two people could be but there was no chemistry, which was how they could house together without breeding much gossip about their breeding. He lolled wasp-waisted against the pane, lamenting, "I suppose I must continue to comfort myself with larvae — hello, who's this dark flower?"

A man that neither had seen before crossed the far street junction, black cloak pulled tight to let nothing escape. Beneath long, unbound hair, his shaven face was sharp-edged as mountain granite. He looked like a night-creature whose soft wings had been damaged in flight and now, unused to walking, hurried to get out of the sunlight. Thalia blew a butterfly at him, too: the flash of color startled him and, turning to see whence it was sent, he spotted her at a distance. With one hand, he flicked away her inquisition. Thalia licked her fly-trap lips, swallowing the insects stuck there.

Some species of butterfly feed on blood. Honeybees drink the tears of larger animals. Once they'd found the scent-path, Thalia's butterflies and Parker's bees traveled between them daily. There were a few others interested in Thalia's garden but Parker's bees were the most frequent and, though worryingly low-count, still the most plentiful.

She lay unclothed on a bed of petals beneath the open window that let in light and her lover's explorers. Thalia closed her eyes and listened to the curious humming suddenly loud in her ear, then gone lower to vibrate her breastbone, back to buzz an upper cochlear arch, then gone again. Small feathered legs lifted the fine hairs that encircled her nipples.

Thalia felt a stiff, jointed fingerlength touch her much lower: a bee turning this way and that on the cloverpatch to divine the nectar inside. A shudder ran through her dimpled flesh. The honeybee nestled its furred head through outer and inner petals to collect moisture while others landed on her lips so she could taste milksap droplets collected from Parker. Little pin-tip sensations walked up and down her breasts and belly. The golden creature at the center of her being perched atop the swollen bud of bundled nerves, vibrating with the high frequency drone of its wings.

"Oh yes," she whispered. One was nice. Two would be better. Another bee added its motion and heat. Thalia curl-clenched flowers in her fists and feet. More. More. More would be perfect. "Almost. Almost!"

There was a shift in the wind and a change in attraction. The insects flittered elsewhere.

Silvanus, mistaking her scream of frustration, tapped on the door. "How was he?"

She threw open the door and shouted, "Am I not still desirable?"

Silvanus brushed past. "You know damn well the answer," with hardly a glance at her unclad body. Disinterested insects bounced off his trouserfront.

Thalia draped herself loosely in a silk robe. She lit a cigarette and smudged herself. "Shoo, get out. I want nothing to do with you. Oh, not you, Sil, I mean these rotten little bastards. I'm swearing off them forever."

"You can't say that every time a paramour fails to please you," he pointed out.

But the pleasure wasn't the problem: she, like everyone else, hosted coprophagic anal beetles. Their burrowing sent constant pulsations from bottom to top. Instead, the problem with her recent partners was the minimized chance of fertilization. She found their efforts poor and wanting. Full swarms would bring better odds of implantation.

She waved an irritable hand, leaving a trail of smoke. "I feel like I only had half his attention. Did I misread him?" she mused. "But then, why has he been sending me poetry like this?" She flicked a thick, folded piece of paper to Silvanus.

"The moth's kiss, first!

The bee's kiss, now!" he read aloud. "Oh, that's filthy. Moths! I hope you two aren't getting into any of that. That's just one step away from rutting in a grave."

She kept trying long distance, with tokens of affection overflying fallow fields and wilted cabbage patches, a far, far way to go just to keep in touch. Fewer seemed to make it across Thalia's threshold with every sunrise. She combed laggard caterpillars from her pubic hair. They rarely prickled her like before, never inched up her sternum and jugular to spin chrysalises in her braids or dangle from her ears anymore.

She was diaphanous against the bright-lit window. Hunger crawled around within her. "Maybe we're too far apart. Perhaps my scent has faded with age. I might have better prospects in a neighborhood closer to those more my type. But Parker said it is the same everywhere else."

Silvanus gasped. "You've had contact with him? In person?"

"Hardly. We've been writing. Matters are even worse upcoast, so he says. He says just one province over they've placed everyone into segregated greenhouse dormitories, close enough for entomophily. That's quite risky, though, isn't it?"

The wider the field, the more stopovers a pollinator would make. Too close, and incest insects flitting amongst pheromone families would create a monocrop. An unvarying culture was a vulnerable culture.

"Are you quite well?" he asked. "You seem green."

"Yes, yes, just —" she looked at the fistfuls of empty husks she'd been left holding "— just brooding."

That night, Thalia dreamed of a moth, heard its hard body batting against the glass. She rose from her bed, opened the window, opened her silk robe, lay back down and let it in. "Yes, I'll be your night-blooming flower."

The atlas moth, as big as a man, settled its weight upon her. Each of its six legs upon Thalia's skin like a live wire. The beating of its velvet wings vibrated her through and through, rattled the bedframe, shook the floorboards, rang the window glass. Thalia's gratified cries were lost beneath the noise.

She awoke on sweat-soaked, crumpled sheets, shivering, dewed with a liquid that — when she ran a hand up her abdomen to her lips — tasted sweet. This was the passion she wanted in a mate, what her body craved. If she couldn't attract it from afar, she would take the matter in hand.

With a long flexible reed plucked from the creekside and a scrap of lace torn from her old petticoats, Thalia teased Parker Beaman's penis. His bees had led her, after many wildflower detours, to his modest baroque bachelor estate, where she'd proposed an unorthodox activity. He lay sprawled, beard gone, bare-faced, blindfolded by her other underthings while she tried to make the lace act like an insect and get his blood stirring. His pulse twitched visibly in the vein but still hadn't sprouted upright.

"Which you so laughingly call

brown butterflies fluttering," he recited, to convince himself. There was movement in the peat moss at its base: though most had died off or pupated, three white larvae still inched around. Ah. He wasn't getting the normal amount of stimulation. Not that anybody was, not anymore.

Thalia put her fingers directly on him, wriggled them convincingly enough that he began to unfurl. But again, he wilted.

"I belong to your jaw," he told her. "I want to duel, dew-wet in tongues."

So Thalia inverted her position to saddle her hips near his face. Her snail tongue emerged from iridescent lips to trace a trail through undergrowth while Parker's lingual papillae like caterpillar feet quested past damp filaments, into the wood-smoke mouthfeel, and was quickly drunk on her intoxicant.

Thalia's mouth found his secondary scrotum, a geodesic dome of hexagonal honeycomb nestled against the first. Parker gasped for air. Thalia gently broke through its waxy rind, spilling out royal jelly and gummy, half-grown queen pupae, which she hungrily swallowed down. Parker lapped up droplets. Her legs clamped, fingers clutched. Sudden seed spouted from his root. Too soon! A pollen spurt of dandelion puffs got in her eyebrows, her hair, got everywhere.

She carefully gathered as much of it as she could in her hand, pushed Parker's face away from her flowerbed, and planted deep in herself with her own fingers.

Thalia arose. Parker's tongue lolled, sluglike. His penis, too, lay limp as a fat worm. His entire body, in fact, seemed boneless and flaccid. She retrieved her underwear from his face. A line of ants crawled up the bedstead and into his open mouth without disturbing his sleep.

"Rather distasteful and displeasing. I shudder at ever trying it that way again. But what else is a girl expected to do?" Another month had come and gone without bearing fruit. Of course, even without germination, every body still provided a place for pollinators to rest and replenish. All played a part in the cultivation. "Are you listening?"

The town outside was black with fresh-fallen night, and she'd put a candle in the window. A moth had gotten in. Silvanus leaped about the room swatting at it. "I hear you."

"I have been engaged in much thinking," Thalia declared. "Sil... do you remember that night — I mean, the time you and I —"

He paused on tiptoe with one arm outstretched. The moth rested in a ceiling corner just beyond his reach. "I remember."

"We are not what anyone would call 'a natural pair', so how did such a passion come about without warning, and why did it not repeat ever after? I confess, the experience of what your pollinators did to my senses was exquisite. Never did I imagine that stingers could be used to stimulate in such a manner! Perhaps, seeing our current unsatisfactory arrangements, we two could again —?"

The moth abruptly headed straight for Silvanus's face. He snatched it from the air. "That night was a mistake," he said lowly, and could not face her. "I was in the depths of loneliness, I don't expect you'd understand. You have had countless suitors. I've seen your body draped head-to-ankle in their admiration, not limited to just one species. The fullness of your field supports an entire ecosystem, whereas I, even before the insect population declined, always had far fewer offers.

"That night, Thalia… I'm ashamed of what I did. There was a person somewhere in town whose wasps were almost like mine but not alike enough to be romantically aligned. So in an attempt to make my body more attractive, I changed myself. I altered the smell of my sweat, the taste of my fluids. I mimicked a different type of flower that my absent lover's species would find alluring, and it worked! But it also attracted yours simply because of our physical proximity. I'm sorry, Thalia. It was most pleasing but I didn't intend it, and I won't do it again."

Thalia took his other hand, and he was shocked by the intimacy. "I understand, my dear friend, and I'd never ask you to change who you are. Only tell me, how did you do such a thing?"

The question reminded him of his captive. He went to the window.

"The people of the moth encounter similar difficulties, because there are far fewer moon-driven pollinators. So they've found ways of enticing otherwise incompatible mates. Of course, they only doom themselves doing this, because any resultant offshoot will smell less like a nightflower and attract fewer moths, perpetuating their death spiral. Do not treat with them. The moth is a creature of ruin."

He couldn't even bring himself to eat it. Instead he ground its brittle body in his palms, brushed away its dust, and blew out her candle. With the window open they could hear a chanting crowd below, could see the glow of bonfires in a nearby green-square, and smell burning hair.

"There they are again," said Thalia, coming close enough he could feel her warm breath. "Seven nights in a row. Why is anyone drawn to them?"

A campaign of back-to-nature types was spreading through the countryside like wild fire, locust-eaters preaching a cleansing diet of agricultural pests. And now it had come to this town.

"People are desperate and alone and afraid," Silvanus said. "There's worry that it's not just reproduction at risk but food as well."

Food? The word sounded foreign. It had been long since she'd heard anyone mention such a concept. Sex and sustenance came to them, entered a person without any effort on their part. Like a pitcher plant, like a flytrap, like an open and expectant pistil. At least, it had been that way until recently, before pollinator decline threatened their way of life. Maybe it was parasites, maybe it was predators. Perhaps it was the weather and pollution. Or maybe it simply was never meant to last.

"You're not alone, though, Sil. I am here."

He took a deep breath. "The shadow of my loneliness is cast deeper because of your light. I was going to steal away in the morning, but how could I without telling you? I'm leaving, to live otherwhere."

Tears fell down her cheeks onto her skirts like raindrops on petals. "Because of me?"

"No! I've found someone. They say they can help."

"When will you go?"

The sound outside swelled.

"Soon. Tonight. Now." He cast an anxious glance to the window, and then he was down the stairs and out the door. Gone.

In bed, Thalia couldn't stop mulling what he'd said, thoughts going round and round her head like nightflyers trapped in a lampshade. To be someone else! To mask your flaws under a sweet perfume, become the fountain of desire to which all came for satiating. Finally she sat up. Now! she thought, fiercely. Before it was too late.

It was colder outside than she had anticipated, going out only in her nightdress and a shawl, the path ill-lit by a hooded lantern. A heavy fog filled her hair with droplets that ran down her shoulders. She lost both slippers in some mud, sharp gusts yanked her shawl away into the treetops so that by the time she reached the closest botanical garden, Thalia was shaking and sodden. She uncovered her lamp to let it shine full on a field of jasmine shrubs that only opened at night. Tiny luminous beings moved among them.

Several of these flew to her, thinking she'd brought the moon. Luna moths with wingspans as wide as her face. One covered her mouth and slid its proboscis down her throat. Another touched the small of her back through the thin linen, walked up her spine, and cupped the back of her neck, sending a flutter through her chest.

Thalia shielded the light. The moths lifted away, beckoning like pale hands until she followed over uneven cobblestones and tree roots. She stumbled down an unfamiliar path into a part of town unknown to her, with the moths pausing here and there to savor a casa blanca lily, that midnight candy, or a mushroom, on and on unto the stoop of a stone cottage wedged among the stacks of shingle shack apartments.

Smoke from leaky chimneys hung from the eaves and clouded the rooftops. The buildings were dark and shuttered, unlike Thalia's neighborhood of bright, open windows and filigreed balconies. Here, there was no sign of sexual exploration other than a few peppered moths furtively coupling among soot-streaked walls, camouflaged by their industrial melanism.

A light showed within the cottage. Thalia's guiding moths slipped under its door, which opened in response. In the sudden brightness, Thalia – barefoot, muddy, dripping water – said, "It's you!"

The man inside said, "You as well." He invited her in, sat her in front of the fire to dry, and put his heavy traveling cloak on her shoulders, the same one he'd been wearing when —

"I saw you," she remembered, "from my window, that day I noticed Parker on the street."

The grooves bracketing his mouth deepened. "Parker Beaman."

Thalia said, "Oh, is he a friend of yours?" A wicked hope had stirred to life inside her at the sight of him but now she crushed it like a bug.

He was Holt Hollis, new to town. Like many others, migrating for better prospects. His obsidian eyes glinted in the firelight, the broad muscles of his back shifted under his shirt when he fed more wood into the grate.

"I was told you could make someone desire you," Thalia said. "Anyone you choose." She swept back a lock of hair. Her finger brushed the soft-furred moth body hidden there and licking her ear. "Is it a love potion?"

"Not nearly." Holt held up a stoppered glass tube. "I can offer only an aphrodisiac but," he curled it into his hand when Thalia reached for it, "what can you offer?"

"I have some money set aside."

"No. You will offer me a taste." He moved to stand closer to her: "With a bit of your liquid I can make myself appealing to a woman like you, when I need to."

"Yes," Thalia whispered. He towered above her. Her mouth flooded with saliva and she moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. She lifted her head, leaned in —

Holt stepped back with a sickened look on that somber face. "I knew I sensed a deviance about you. In my trade, I've grown accustomed to many requests, but physical touch is too much." He sat on a short stool instead and directed Thalia to stand astride his legs, as close as they could be without making contact.

Then Holt tilted his head back like a nestling and she craned over him, let her lips overflow, and dangled a line of spit down toward his mouth like a silkworm strand, stretching longer and longer without breaking while, with circular motions, Holt's tongue tangled the silver thread into a skein and he was filled with the taste of Thalia's thick syrup.

It took some days to entice Parker Beaman to her house and into her bed.

She'd spruced up the place: set out freshly planted window boxes, placed large bouquets on the nightstands, scattered rose petals on the bedspread. Anything to increase their chances and enhance the aromas.

"No one can see us," she promised. With Silvanus gone, and the neighborhood itself largely deserted, Parker finally acceded. He arrived at her room with:

"When landlords turn the drunken bee

I shall but drink the more!"

They undressed and lay face-to-face with as much space between them as the bed would allow. Thalia went first. She poured some of the mothman's ersatz pheromones into her hand and rubbed under her arms, between her legs, across her gums, then swirled and swallowed a mouthful. Parker did the same, massaging it into his glans. Then they waited for a visitation. Nothing came through the window except sunlight. Thalia watched it slowly creep across the floorboards. A tickle on her elbow became an itch. She went to scratch it and found her arm wobbly as earthworms.

The itching became a burning. Thalia could hardly move, managed just enough to roll onto her back as the fire spread through her veins. The soles of her feet tingled, tips of her ears burned. She felt ants tunnel up from her scalp and ripple all the way down to her openings, where they burrowed back in and crawled under her skin to the top of her head again. Wave after wave of this sensation made her writhe on the bed.

The floral-pattern wallpaper, too, undulated as though behind it an intrusion of cockroaches was chewing on the glue. The bedside flowers seemed to grow larger or higher, unfolding all the way to the roof while Thalia felt as small as a bug. With much effort she turned her head to ask Parker if he saw it as well but his eyes bulging unblinking locked onto empty space instead. A larval thing peeked out from its foreskin to regard her with boredom and then retreated, rolled its collar back up around its neck.

The last of the sun scurried back outside. After a minute it was replaced with moonlight, which jumped over the sill and ran over to climb into bed with them. Soon as it touched her, Thalia was able to sit up, wrung dry.

When had it become so late? And what was all the noise outside?

"Parker, get up. Something is wrong. Parker!" Thalia shook his shoulders, slapped his face, called his name, to no reaction.

Even if Parker couldn't hear her, someone else did: there was a shout from below and then a hammering at the door. Thalia only had time to hastily wrap herself in a cloak and escape out the window before they knocked the door down.

Swiftly she flew to Holt Hollis's step, there pounding on his door with both tiny fists and when he opened it, she went straight to then beating on his chest without any change in rhythm. Her panic and rage were interchangeable. Holt, surprised to find her standing at all — let alone standing there — did not resist as Thalia pushed her way in and began overturning his bottles and pots all the while screaming, "What did you give me? He isn't breathing. He isn't moving!" until at last she came to some crushed flowers she recognized. "Datura? You poisoned us with mad-apple honey?"

Sinking slowly into his seat, Holt said, "So it is done? He is dead?" He began to laugh, at first cruelly, but as the laughter went on it turned into a wrack of relief and Holt slumped into himself, exhausted. "Your Parker Beaman is a thief, a swindler. He stole the queen bee from my lover's swarm, leaving her starved for touch and starved to death."

"Liar."

"'And close your eyes with holy dread

And drunk the milk of Paradise.' Did he ever say such things to you? Sweet words snatched from the mouths of others. I followed him to this city, only awaiting my chance. And you were that chance."

Satisfied, Holt took her by the arm, dragged her to the threshold, and threw her from his house into the dark streets. The whole district was under a cloud of smoke. The mob's torches had increased in number and the pyres in size. In the distance an entire house-row was alight. Frightful, naked figures capered in the fireglow, going door-to-door and pulling people from their homes.

Who could help her in such a state? It was too late for a doctor, too soon for an undertaker: Thalia required, instead, communion with the people on the border between this world and another.

She hunted through gutters for the traditional gift of a dead cat, but the best she could find was a triple-knotted, dead rat king; dug it up from a trash heap in a cold alley on her way to the outskirts' graveyard.

Clutching the bouquet of sewer rats, Thalia called into the dark, to the ones who were midwifed by corpses, who entangled their passion with corpses, who ate meals prepared by corpses. There were signs of their recent presence: fresh furrows in the gravesoil and upturned bones piled on the patchwork grass.

Thalia peered through thick fog and found a pale featureless form there. She put the rat king on a flat stone and backed away until it and the mysterious figure were occluded, then waited to see if her gift would be accepted. She heard movement coming toward her, then a voice from behind, and with it a fetid smell so thick it filled her mouth and caused her to gag. "What do you want with us, fleshcrawler, bug buggerer?" Each word buzzed around her head or zipped by her ear like a fly.

Thalia swallowed. "Help, please. My lover lies dying. You who burrow among the barrows, you know the intricate intimacies of death. Is there nothing you can do? Some potion or medicine to reverse the process?"

The voice cackled. Fat flies made nests in Thalia's armpits and licked the mud from her toes. "Could not find another lover? Roamed far over unplowed fields and found no other flower?"

"It is a sign of a sickness in the world," she insisted. "I fear that if we do not find a cure, it may be the end of humanity."

"Barrenness and famine," the voice scoffed. "No longer can you open your mouth and simply let the meat crawl in on hairy little legs. Pestilence and diseases. No more ladybugs to nibble the aphids off a man's penis or prey on ladies' lice. For pleasure you'll have only each other. Do you think humanity can overcome the revulsion of touching itself, or will it embrace extinction instead?"

It hissed and whistled as if whispering to itself or someone else unseen, then promised, "We have the remedy for all these maladies and malaise." Sour rot-breath wafted across Thalia's face.

She choked back bile. "May I have it, I beg of you."

"In return for your offering, yes, turn around and take what is there."

Behind her — no one, only a carrion flower that hadn't been or she hadn't noticed before. Its ribbed bottom looked like a flowering of raw meat, red as an inside-out eyelid. Rising several meters from its center hole, the fully erect, fleshy stem of an amorphophallus inflorescence.

Thalia grabbed hold of the stem. It smelled of sweat and feces and was warm as a body. She pulled, broke off its tip to about the length of her forearm. The discordant violin twanging of the fly swarm hummed all about her, trailing off a little as she left the cemetery. She was still distracted enough that the ambush caught her entirely unaware.

Three or four or five people leaped upon her as she reached the street, made numberless and anonymous by the darkness and their nakedness, hairlessness, and the powder caked on their bodies. Grabbing her by each limb, they carried Thalia to the nearest bonfire clearing and showed her what they had planned for the salvation of the species.

Firstly they cast aside her foul-smelling cloak and the putrid stamen. Then they brought her to a feeding trough that had been filled with golden-brown liquid deep enough to submerge her. Many hands held her down until she was fully suffused. When they released, she pushed up from it, coughing and vomiting out the honey syrup.

While it still dripped from her eyes, and her arms were heavy with it, her captors next brought a bright-honed sickle and scraped the congealing honey off her body in long curls like soap shavings, taking with it all her hair from scalp, brows, lip, chin, underarms, belly and pubis, down to her ankles and even the fine, darkening strands on her knuckles.

The honey husk fell around her feet like a molted second skin with all her bugs and their eggs trapped within, drowned and preserved in amber. They would eat this too: her cast-off, candied sins. Thalia stood soft and fresh as a new imago while the locust-eaters sifted handfuls of delousing powder onto every inch of her still-sticky body.

But that was only the exterior purification: a man grabbed her wrist and dragged her toward the far edge of the square where no one would see what was to be done to her. They passed another captive, held facedown and screaming as his beetles were roughly extracted. Thalia stumbled along until her captor stopped and spun her around to face him. Her wrist ached in his grasp. Rarely in her life had she been touched, and each time had been an unpleasant happening.

Thalia didn't want to even imagine the kind of sex perversions she'd be subjected to, like those that humankind had resorted to in its prior days of barbarism, before they had developed more sophisticated techniques. The thought of meat touching her, entering her, sent waves of disgust up her spine. Flesh to flesh. Chemical sweat, bad breath, attachment and obligation and possessiveness and pillow talk instead of the far more decorous windows and soft breezes bringing casual, as-you-like-it natural pleasures from afar.

She shut her eyes. Where would he begin? How long would it last? Instead, the man pushed a bundle into her arms. Only once she held it did Thalia recognize her clothes and the length of flower spadix: her nostrils were still encrusted with honey crystals and she could smell nothing else. Only when she looked closely at him did she recognize this man.

"Silvanus! What are you doing here?"

She saw shame in his eyes for what was being done, what he had done, and for thinking he had no other choice. "Go!" he said.

"Come home with me," she said, reaching for him, but he shielded her body from the firelight so she wouldn't be seen, and shoved her into the dark. They both turned away and flew from each other.

Thalia returned home. No person bothered her along the way because she was, by all appearances, one of them now. Her front door had been broken in, her furniture smashed or carried off or thrown out the window. Poor Parker's body had been kicked into a corner to rot. An insect cloud rose up from the corpse. Thalia spread out her cloak best she could and sat. She was weary, and weakened.

The flesh flies and carrion beetles, attracted to her flower's decay-smell, formed a thick cover on the spadix stem. Thalia engulfed as much of its length as she could fit in her mouth and drew it back out, skimming off the insects. Then she laid down and let the flies fill her stomach.

When she regained her strength, Thalia felt pangs of need and desire elsewhere in her body. She ran the soft stem lightly across her shaven head, leaving a new scent on her skin, brushed herself everywhere she could reach, used it inside as an applicator for the corpse flower cologne. The first few intrusive flies flitted to her thighs.

Without her butterflies, she would never be the same. No one would ever be the same, except the dead. The dead remain the dead. On Parker's body the flesh flies made their ablutions in the liquid of his skin, in the fluids held within, in emissions and secretions, ejections and excreta, with little footprints made their impressions. Then they landed on Thalia, ovipositors laying small pearly eggs, which became wiggling maggots. Milky dew dripped from the flies' feet onto her petals pink as the inside of an eye.

All the old ways were gone, but there were other pollinators, attracted to stranger flowers and their smells. It was the only guarantee of continuing the species. Thalia closed her eyes and felt wet new life wriggling in.

"Almost. Almost —"