Moth

I first felt it under my skin. 

A faint tickle like the brush of fingertips tracing the inside of my veins. I thought it was nothing until my wrist bursts open due to something wriggles inside my flesh. 

Clawing at my skin, my fingernails tear through the flesh as a moth escapes free from the clutches of my veins. I try to close the open wound but more white moths are eating its way out. 

The smell of rot and decay assault my senses as they crawl back into the folds of my flesh.

The harvest spreads quickly like fungus. Underneath my forearms, chest, and every inch of skin, moths are laying eggs and withering beneath the surface of my skin. 

I try to bandage myself to hide the rotting skin. But my flesh is no longer mine. I can feel every flutter of a wing, every tunnel chewed on my insides. There's holes in my organs as the moths chew through the meat. 

I drag a knife across my lower abdomen, desperate to get the moths. My hands slip inside my guts pulling some moths free but they bite my hands as I yelp from the contact. I can feel them gnawing at my internal organs, hollowing cavities for cocoons.

My stomach is the worst. The moths have eaten away parts of the intestines, leaving thin, ruptured tubes that collapse when I touch them. I press my palm into the mass and feel organs squish, slip, and twitch. The smell is beyond comprehension — iron, decay, mold, and the faintly sweet musk of wings.

Every breath is agony. My lungs are crawling with moths. I cough, and wings burst from my mouth, brushing my tongue with powdery scales. The ribcage strains to hold itself together, groaning as cocoons wedge between bones. My heart pulses in a hollowed cavity. 

Next I tear open my chest, hand plunging into a cavity where the lungs should be solid. They are shredded, wings beating from within, moist and wet, as if bug like maggots nestle inside me. The heart is a sponge, its chambers eaten, its walls chewing themselves further. Blood thickens into sludge, dripping into the hollowed abdomen where intestines hang in shredded loops.

I claw at my liver. It's no longer a solid organ, just a soft, spongy nest of insects and gore. The gallbladder is punctured; bile oozes, mixing with larvae in a slick, revolting slurry. My stomach convulses with the motion of the swarm inside me. I vomit again, this time a writhing mass of moths, their wings scraping against teeth and tongue, a cloud of wings and blood.

The moths enter my mouth, nose, and ears. My sinuses fill. My tongue is hollowed from the inside. I taste the invasion in every breath, every pulse. My vocal cords vibrate with the fluttering of millions of wings.

My legs collapse beneath me. Skin and muscle peel like wet wallpaper. My knees split, tendons unravel, exposing marrow riddled with eggs. I watch with fascination and terror as moths burst from the bones themselves, hollowing cavities in the tibia and femur.

My arms follow. Shoulders crack. Humerus splinters as larvae burrow into marrow. I feel every segment of exoskeleton, every antennae probing, every claw scraping at the inside of my veins.

I touch my face. The eye I once winked with dissolves under soft chewing. The orbit fills with wings. My jaw dislocates, hanging uselessly, mandibles scraping against teeth. My tongue dissolves, swallowed by the swarm. 

My spine cracks. Vertebrae split, marrow exposed, writhing with the larvae's fury. Ribs bend outward, forced apart by growing cocoons. I collapse, a heap of flesh, bone, and wings.

I'm decomposing as if I'm already dead and buried somewhere six feel under in a coffin.

I can feel every swarm inside, every egg hatching, every mandible chewing. My consciousness stretches across thousands of tiny bodies, my thoughts split, tangled, screaming with the hive. Their humming fills my ears then the world goes silent. 

Then she appears as I gag as one moth wriggles up my throat and escapes from between my lips.

"Alfie." Effie says barely above a whisper.

Effie collapses next to me, putting her fingers inside down my throat and pulls out another white moth.

Suddenly a hunger washes over me. They chew through the soft fat beneath my skin, pockets collapsing, leaving dimples and hollows. I can feel them slide, slick and warm, tunneling toward muscle. My abdomen caves where the fat is eaten away. My thighs sag.

She places her palm against my concave stomach, her breath trembling with arousal. "So hollow." Effie murmurs, pressing harder. They wriggle across her hand, but do not burrow into her. She brings one to her lips, licks its soft body, and takes a bite. 

My body spasms with pain and hunger for her.