This is a little fun story I wrote at uni for a student who said her back yard was filthy and she decided to tidy it up; she discovered some maggots that looked like 'wriggley rice' that just wouldn't die, even after two gallons of bleech were poured on them


They Lived On!
by Jonathan Malory

… it was after I got to the third layer of bin-bags in the back yard that I first saw them, millions of them; like wriggley rice writhing to the surface in a desperate struggle to escape what lay beneath. Of course I’d seen maggots before, but there was something unusual; something distinctly odd and out of place going on here. It seemed as if some of the little grubs were being sucked back down, I could almost feel their panic.

Then I saw it, what was really going on. There were bigger, fatter worms beneath gobbling up the smaller ones; cannibals! They weren’t huge but just perceptibly bigger to make them appear freakish, preternatural. The thing with ordinary maggots is that they don’t eat living flesh, that’s why they use them in hospitals these days to help clean up wounds; they eat all the dead useless flesh and leave the wound cleaner than we ever could. But these things were eating living flesh and to my horror some of them were trying to eat through my shoes to get at my feet. Well I can tell you now, I wasn’t having that!

I kicked them off and ran to the kitchen to get the bleach, it was a huge four litre bottle that someone had nicked from work. I didn’t bother watering it down, just poured the lot over the infested area. I almost killed myself, the air filled with the choking stench of bleach, I could see it shimmering as it burnt my eyes and throat; I had to get away from there fast but I couldn’t see. Turning slipping gagging, I lunged in the direction of the house and found myself on the concrete gazing in wonder at what I saw. The industrial-strength bleach had stripped away everything but the monsters’ hive and the creatures themselves, they lived on! It was poor Tixy, our household cat, she’d being missing for days; we thought she’d just come back like she always does. And under her was the next-door neighbour's Red Setter, filthy aberrations squirming out from the poor darling’s eye sockets. The bastards were living on our domestic pets, they’d killed ‘em both and now they were after me! They didn’t get me, well not all of me anyway.