2021-09-08
My Worst Nightmare

MY WORST NIGHTMARE

“Maggots…Why did it have to be maggots?”

Channeling the spirit of Indiana Jones, when he has to be dropped into the middle of his worst nightmare, a tomb filled with slithering and hissing snakes, I exclaimed much as he did, a few hours ago. Except my serpents were wriggling, tiny and white.

Pit me against scorpions, coyotes, pack rats, relentless cactus thorns, rattle snakes or an invisible bear or mountain lion and I may be initially intimidated, but I won’t cower at the challenge.

However, force me to deal with maggots and I writhe and will torturously begrudge the task.

Today, now yesterday, I had to take a few buckets full of them to the dump. Alas, we’d had to leave our collective kitchen garbage bags out in a large garbage can outside in the hotbed of the Southwestern sun until we had amassed just enough trash to merit loading up the truck bed and driving to the transfer station.

We used to go once a week when we had renovation going on and there was a lot of demolition detritus, but now we have to wait weeks, which is ample time for plagues of flies to plant their eggs among the hot mounds of decomposing rot.

So, by the time we’ve collected enough, there are nightmarish amounts of creepy, crawly maggots oozing out the bags. And you always know they’re there because the awful smell of decay is a dead giveaway. Worse is when there’s inevitably a tear in the bag and they begin cascading out, eerily threatening to fall onto you and into every crevice and opening of an opportunity in your clothing. Eek, Ugh, Ewww.

Which reminds me, I left a dead bird riddled with flies on the back lawn this morning and I forgot to pick it up, which, alas, is simply another breeding ground for my own worst nightmare-come-true.