After a harrowing sorting process, one tiny maggot, formerly Brad Rivera before his unfortunate mishap with the latest version of the Chronivac, made the long journey to a regional landfill with a truckload of other garbage rejected as unsuitable for recycling.
Confused by the chaos all around him, Brad remained clueless to what had actually gone wrong. From the beginning, he had only known one thing. He had expected to become a housefly, not a crawling, disgusting maggot.
He had escaped being crushed numerous times during the sorting process, but now, although he didn’t know it, his situation offered a glimmer of hope. All he needed to do was keep feeding. Eventually, he would complete his metamorphosis from maggot to fly… if he could keep evading lethal obstacles.
And if there was one thing his new form excelled at, it was feeding.
As soon as the truck unloaded its cargo of rotting garbage, one eyeless little maggot began to burrow its tube-shaped form deep into the most putrid section of the surrounding garbage.
As heavy machinery spread the new offerings over the surface of the landfill, shrieking gulls wheeled and dived as they foraged for scraps from the massive landfill, but Brad remained blissfully unaware of happenings above the hills of garbage as he filled his tiny gut as he ceaselessly burrowed through the rotting debris.
Time meant nothing to him, but two days after his arrival at the landfill, his body began to change again. Motion became difficult and his hunger abated as he developed a thick shell that enveloped his puny form. The growing shell that encased him brought on other changes, too.
After an interval of concern, Brad’s mind calmed as his new form went into a dormant state. During his time in this state, an array of physical changes began to take place. His form sprouted six legs, a pair of antennae and, on his back, a pair of wings, all cramped in the confines of the tough, protective shell.
One last change, terribly gross, manifested as a fluid-filled sac atop Brad’s fly head. Eventually, as he slowly returned to consciousness, he began to butt his head and the sac against the shell surrounding him.
The process took a total of five days, aided by the warm, humid environment of the stinking landfill. On the fifth day, Brad began to reach out with his mind and get a feel for a new body. He grew familiar with it as wings twitched and legs flexed. He continued to pound at the shell with the fluid sac until he burst through the shell and was able to crawl out. He still needed to squirm his way out of a thin layer of garbage.
Exhausted by the effort, he needed a few moments as his new wings dried and bright sunshine warmed his form.
After a rest, he moved his wings, heard the resulting buzz.
“I’m a fly!” Brad realized. He didn’t know why the transformation had been so delayed, and he didn’t care.
Excited thoughts tumbled one against the other.
“I can fly home,” he thought. “Back to Mark.”
He took to the air, hovering on his wings, and was met with a devastating sight. The dimensions of the landfill stretched far beyond what the tiny insect could see. All around him, he heard the buzz from other wings as more flies continuously emerged and added their own buzzing to the cacophony.
“Where do I go?” Brad wondered to himself.
He flew higher to escape the loud buzzing of thousands of other flies and tried to orient himself and choose a direction.
“Mark, here I come!” Brad thought and zipped in a direct line, trusting he would eventually fly beyond the landfill.
Quite possibly, he would have done so if the snap of an enormous beak hadn’t closed around his tiny form as one of the omnipresent gulls locked onto the bug that had flown away from the confusing swirl of its fellow insects.
“No!” Brad cried wordlessly inside the darkness of a beak that reeked of garbage. “Wait!”
It was all he had time for before the enormous bird gulped and swallowed his still wriggling, protesting form, cutting short any miraculous journey home.