A Handful of Flies

Marty flinched under his covers when the door slammed out in the living room, but that slamming door, followed by the muffled cries of his mom, meant that it was over. The curse words, the yelling, the breaking of things, it was over. Marty sighed. Soon, his mom would cry herself to sleep, and the quiet would take over.

Sometimes, though, the quiet was worse.

Because that was when the thing under his bed came.

The thing only came when his mom and dad fought. His dad’s anger seemed to call it, feed it, and make it solid. It made the thing mean, and Marty didn’t like mean things.

The nightlight plugged into the wall on the other side of his room took Marty’s attention. It was only a bare bulb. If it ever had a cover, it had broken and disappeared long ago. The bulb was probably close to breaking as well. It flickered, became faint, flared to normal, then dimmed again. The brighter flashes allowed Mary enough light to see the random pattern of drawings he had taped to the wall above his bed. They were mostly pictures drawn in jagged lines of the houses he liked to look at on his way home from school. In a few, he put stick figures families on green lawns and tried to make them smile. He adjusted himself on the bed, stretched his knees out, and decided he didn’t want to look at the pictures anymore. He looked instead at the clothes scattered across the carpet like dark stains.

Before he could determine which clothes were clean and which were dirty, the light flared so bright that Marty squinted and tensed, fearing the bulb would explode.

The bulb didn’t explode, but something did tug the covers at his feet.

Marty tugged back and pulled the blanket up his chest as far as he could without exposing his toes. The thing liked to touch his toes, and Marty hated that. The feel of those fingers curdled his skin, so he had learned he had to stay awake when the thing came to make sure that didn’t happen.

But not sleeping meant more time to be scared. He would end up exhausted tomorrow at school, making things worse. Marty got jumpy when he was tired. The slightest sound, the slightest bang of a book on a desk, or a sudden cough tightened every muscle until he swore they would snap and send parts of him flying across the classroom.

When the other kids saw him jump like that…

The blanket jerked from his fingers and slid down to his chest, leaving a trail of static sparks as the material ran down the rough fabric of his pajama top.

“Please,” he whispered, “Leave me alone.”

A deep but barely audible laugh filled his ears.

Marty shivered.

He shouldn’t have said that. Begging made everything worse. When he was in the school bathroom, and the boys came out of the stall trailing stink, when they cornered him and tried to make him smell their fingers, pleading only brought those stinky hands closer to his face.

Why? he wondered. Why did he have to live this way? What had he ever done?

Nothing. That’s what.

Marty had always been good. He swore he would never, ever, let himself get mad like his dad did. Never to be mean like his dad and the kids at school. And Marty never did get mad. He never got mean.

The fingers inched up the foot of the bed, their tips black, sharp, and oozing darkness.

Pull your feet up! Something yelled in Marty’s head, but he was too scared to move.

The hand inched higher. Marty watched the charred skin crack and break with each grasp at the blanket. A stench of something rotten floated out of those tears and cracks to punch his nose.

That was new.

So were the white, wormy things that squiggled out of those cracks like they were following the smell.

Something buzzed by his face; a flutter of wings swept against his cheek.

A fly.

Marty trembled. Flies ate poo and filth. They lived on it. They rested their feelers in it—those same feelers now twitching, buzzing around his face.

Marty didn’t want poo on him. He didn’t want those boys’ fingers to touch him at school; he didn’t want flies on his body in his bedroom.

The deep laugh rumbled like distant thunder.

Another fly, then another, then another sprouted from the white worms squirming from the charred hand. They came at him like missiles, sweeping across his face and hair. They ricocheted off his chest. One dove at his head, its buzz getting louder until it slammed into his ear, just a breath away from the ear hole.

Marty released the blanket and swatted. The fly smacked against his palm. Another fly darted toward his eye, trying to rest its dirty legs on the white and dig its way inside. Again, Marty swatted, trying not to think that to keep the flies from touching him, he had to touch them first.

The charred hand jerked the blanket further, exposing the frayed waistband of Marty’s pajama bottoms. Marty scrambled for the blanket, but it was too late. The flies swarmed the area above his waist, buzzing and swaying as they tried to get underneath the fabric.

They were trying to get inside him—through his nose, his eyes, and lower. They wanted to feast on his guts, on the poo and filth inside him. But they wouldn’t eat him completely. They would keep him alive, growing, multiplying, swelling inside him.

His arms pinwheeled and swatted, generating enough to cause his drawing to sway on the wall.

Why? he thought. Why? Why?

His hands circled and slapped.

The thing with the charred hands laughed again.

Marty opened his mouth to scream, but before he could, armies of flies streamed toward his lips like angry bees.

Marty clamped his mouth shut, and his vision changed. Everything went fuzzy and hazy in front of him—the charred hands went wavy as if water sloshed under the charred skin. The flies became no more than blotches of fast-moving gray. His fists balled into fists, his fingernails piercing his palms.

Get out! he screamed in his mind. Get out! Get out of my room and leave me the hell alone!

And if it didn’t leave him alone, he would snatch those blackened fingers, grab them, and bend them backward until they broke and snapped, until the snapping became louder than the sound of his dad’s fists against whatever was in front of him.

But what came instead was silence.

A silence like when the door would inevitably slam in his living room, except this time, he didn’t hear his mother crying. No fingers climbed up his bed, either. No more flies buzzed around him.

A shiver passed over Marty’s shoulder.

Around him, the room looked not like his room but a different one—a different room where the nightlight shone brighter, steadier, and where the shadows didn’t seem so deep. In this new light, he could see not only his drawings but also the smudges on the faces of the stick figures, where he erased the smiles and replaced them with more realistic expressions.

He trembled again. His eyes swam across the room, looking and searching for something but he wasn’t sure for what.

Marty pulled the covers to his chest to cover himself against the rising panic.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered finally. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled. That was mean.”

The silence, heavy and thick, remained.

“Please,” Marty said. “Please. I’m sorry. Come back. Please. I promise I won’t get mad again.”

But still, the silence remained.

And sometimes, the silence was worse.