Imagination and A Monster Chapter III

Some disgusting stuff with maggots happens. 

It is cold and dark, when the singular creature wakes up. The space it finds itself in is not wide and vast, nothing like the expanse of the universe it was born in. Instead, it finds that it can barely fit itself in it, and that it is hollow, and cold. 

And rotting. 

The creature can feel the meat of whatever it is inside of, already souring and turning to mush. It can feel the maggots, writhing in the small space. 

It is in a corpse. 

It does not know how it got there, only that one moment, it was in the emptiness of its home, and now it’s in corpse guts. 

The body has long been vacated, it seems, and whatever is still left of it that the maggots haven’t taken yet are no longer functioning, so it can’t use the eyes to look outside. Instead, it lets itself sink into the maggots, into the mass of them buried deep into the animal’s chest. 

Slowly, it spills out on the earth. 

The sun is warm - actually, it feels warmer than the last time it had been here, but it has never taken on the form of maggots before, so perhaps that’s why. It lets the maggots extract themselves from the corpse, and then the sludge moves, crawling over the grass and downwards. 

It needs something bigger, something with significantly more mobility than a couple of wriggling worms that it can barely cram itself into. There’s only so many of it that it can fold up and stuff into such a tiny space and not lose anything, after all. 

So it crawls along the grass, until it spots an anthill. Ants are significantly a whole lot faster than maggots, but they’re still small, so it’s still going to be a pain, but at least it will be able to find a body faster. It heaves the maggots onto the anthill, and it emerges as an entire colony, bursting from the anthill and heading out, searching for something else, something bigger, something that ants can easily reach. 

It finds a sleeping deer and lets the ants swarm it, sinking into its flesh, before waking up in its skin.

It’s a lot easier to walk around with this body. It’s still cramped, but it’s not as uncomfortable as being too many tiny things at once. It feeds and drinks to nourish the flesh of the deer, and then it searches. It doesn’t know what for, but it searches. It should, first, find a way to get off of this tiny planet, but when it begins to think that, it then questions - can’t it easily just escape out of this body and return to its home?

But then it realizes something - something it hadn’t noticed in its distress of being stuffed into a corpse, and it is that, despite the fact that it feels cramped into the deer’s body, it doesn’t feel like it’s all together. It’s a funny feeling, like knowing you’re taller than what you currently are, but you’re still staring up at something anyway. It is larger than the deer, sure, but it’s still not large enough.

Something is missing. 

And just like that, it remembers. 

-

It seethes, as it wanders in the forest. It does not know this forest and thus it has no idea where to go and what to do, but it wants to have a body to move around in, so it has to feed and sustain this measly little deer, at least until it figures out what to do. 

It moves, for a long, long while. It does not know if this deer has a forest and a family to return to, but it doesn’t care. It walks, it keeps it alive, and searches for some way to get out of here. It is far too weak to simply leave this planet, to shoot up like starlight and like the miracles the people of this place mistake as. It is far too diminished to even know where the rest of it is, if it has been destroyed, or hidden away, or spread into too little pieces for it to reach out to.

So it settles for finding information, anything it can. 

It wanders out of the greenery the deer would usually flock to, when it spots a patch of land that’s been paved and reformed. Humanity, it thinks. So the damned things still are around. Perhaps some of them have seen something, because surely, something must have happened around here when it fell onto their planet. It’s landed here, of all places, and if it remembers correctly, humanity loves to make mountains out of molehills.

But the humans look more miserable than usual, when it creeps along the edges of their town. The city looks abandoned, and the few who are there look like they’re starving. When nightfall comes, the city is bathed in darkness, and people huddle into their homes pitifully. There are very few that come out and build a fire, gathering around it for warmth. 

It’s like they’ve lost their teeth, the creature thinks, like they’ve gone soft in the wake of evolution. It is merely the night, and it is not even winter, and yet, they’re wallowing in their misery. 

How long has it been?

It stays in the edges of town, and resolutely decides not to be seen when someone attempts to hunt the deer on the third day. Slowly, it pieces things together with the gossip it catches. Something has happened, something big, and whatever it was had killed all of their means of surviving in the wilderness, whatever it seems to be now. Humans, it remembers, constantly change things to suit their needs, and whatever they have created this time has failed them. Fire doesn’t seem to be enough for them. Nobody is tilling the fields, and there are no water wells where people gather around every morning. There is only the hard stone of this city, and the misery of its people.

They are waiting, it thinks, for help, but they cannot call for it. They have sent out some of their young men, but they have yet to return, and it has been weeks. 

They are in yet another point of their history, whether they realize it or not, and it would be a fool to miss it. There is plenty of grass for the deer, in the forest, and there is water in the river if it makes the journey uphill for a few hours in the morning, something which even the humans have begun doing, although they go downhill instead. It will be fine. It is not sure if the humans will be. 

A few more weeks later, their young men arrive. There are people in strange vehicles who’ve come along with them. They’re in a new form of transportation, maybe, since the things move without horses to pull them. They have food and medicine with them, and the people of the city rejoice. 

The creature looks on, disappointed. It would have been fun to see them turn against each other, in their hunger and their terror. They always do, if it meant they would survive, and while the creature is amused by it, it also respects them for it. 

But then, it gets exactly what it wants. As the humans who have arrived with the food start to give them out to the people of the city, someone starts arguing with someone else, and eventually they come to blows, scratching and punching and biting each other hard enough to bleed. The others try to pull them apart, but one of them picks up a stone and strikes the other. 

They go down. 

The creature watches in rapt attention as someone else strikes the attacking human, and then someone comes to their defense, and the entire street is a mess of blows and snot and blood, until someone fires a weapon the creature has yet to learn about and everyone stops in fear. The creature keeps its glee to itself, sated, as the humans shuffle about, some of them apprehended and the others going back in line to receive their aid. 

Humans haven’t changed. It doesn’t think they ever will.

-

They make a routine out of it. They receive help and supplies from the strange new vehicles and the people that come with them, and then these people leave, and then come back weeks later with more aid. Their power - electricity, the creature has heard it be called - still hasn’t come back and they’re still as miserable as ever, but in the last few days, the fear in the city has been growing stronger.

It is almost winter season. 

They’ll be able to build their fires, of course. That’s what they used to do, however long ago it has been that the creature has since been here, but they are afraid now. They have forgotten what their ancestors have done, the survival that is written in their blood from the stubbornness of those that came before them. These humans, these children - they have gotten soft over the years, for whatever reason, although the creature has an inkling that this reason is something of their own devising.

How pitying. They learn to slaughter and to sacrifice for the sake of living a little longer and in the process grow dull. 

This deer it is wearing is going to have to take shelter in the winter too, if it is to survive and not freeze, so the creature begrudgingly hands the reins over to it, for the moment, soothing its panic with a simplified explanation, as much as one can explain things to an animal.

It is a shame that it cannot see the humans fumble around in the cold. Violence is sure to break out, after all. What would happen if their aid would stop, unable to continue in the freezing winds? What would happen if their food runs out, weeks before the winter is supposed to end? Would they resort to eating each other? Killing their own children like they did before?

But it needs a body, so instead it satisfies itself in the knowledge that when it awakens, blood will have been spilled in the city. Maybe no one’s going to die, but someone’s going to try to make sure it happens, just for the chance to live one second longer. It’s sure of it. 

It’s what defines humanity, after all. 

When it wakes, it finds that the city is still covered in snow, but not so deep that it would completely bury everything. Spring is coming, and the sunlight has started to thaw everything out. 

The town is quieter than usual. A few people shuffle out in the morning, a couple of them avoid each other, and there’s two houses that look like they’ve been broken into. It doesn’t know if there’s a nearby cemetery where they’ve buried their dead in, if anyone died, so it sadly can’t try to check, but the skittish behavior around each other is enough to make the creature walk about with a bit more skip in its step. 

In three days, it’s pieced together the general picture of what’s happened. The winter has, in fact, stopped their aid from coming in, although in the early weeks, it had managed to come through. Unfortunately, the food had run out in the middle of the snow season. One house was broken into in an attempt to take the residents’ food, and this attempt failed, but the residents were so enraged, they’d broken into the offending party’s house and attacked them. 

No one died, but severe injuries were dealt out. The creature can see them plain on the limps and the dirty bandages of some of the people who go out to collect water from the river. 

How delightful. They really didn’t disappoint. 

Humans are such lovely things. 

-

It’s months before the power finally comes back on. By this time, the creature has mastered how to hide as a deer, keeping to the shadows to avoid hunters, but scavenging for information in gossip passing through windows, the conversations the humans have while doing laundry by the river, and whatever bit of written news gets blown from the trash bin to the streets at night. The soldiers who deliver the food to the residents bring newspapers and bulletins, sometimes, to keep them updated with what’s been going on in the bigger cities.

When the power does come back on, the residents rejoice, celebrating loudly in their city square with dancing and singing. The creature dejectedly watches the cacophony of it. 

But it counts the amount of people around, significantly less than when it had first arrived; and it looks at the gaunt, frail frames of the humans, looks at the way their clothes hang onto their bodies loosely. They look sickly. They look dirty. They look like they’ve been starved in the months they’ve spent isolated from the rest of the world. 

It keeps its glee to itself. The damage has already been done. 

With the return of electricity, the speed of communication and dissemination of information also returns, and so the creature finds itself collecting and putting together more of the bits and pieces of what’s led to the world falling to this state. Within two months of power returning and the countries of the world being able to connect and deliver aid to each other, they’ve been cataloguing the damage that’s happened and figuring out exactly what happened in the first place. 

And it knows exactly what’s happened the moment it hears of the news from outside the window of one of the houses near the edge of town. 

Freak solar weather, the garbled voice from the television says. Meteor strikes, all over the globe;  auroras seen in places they shouldn’t be seen in; people mistaking the phenomenon for daylight before they checked their clocks and realized something was wrong. It remembers the feeling of being held by too many hands and too many teeth and being pulled apart into pieces and pieces and pieces. 

It fell, all over the universe, into far away places and tiny parts, to the point where it can hardly feel where the rest of it is. And fell in pieces, all over this world.

It lets that realization sink into its mind even after the people in the house have turned in for the night, grasping and turning it over, trying to see if it’s what it’s really heard. It is. It can replay the exact way the voice said it just three hours ago. 

It’s not complete, but some of it is around. 

An idea comes to mind.