A friendless maggot called Qwertyman awoke at 3pm as darkness edged through a slanted window in his one-room garret. He coughed and wanted to stay in the fetid air under his quilt. Damp spores had infested his chest. Last night he’d heard rat claws scuttle in the walls, before next doors bleeping house-alarm scared them away. It may have been a dream though.
Ginger-tipped bristles grew out his cheeks, which he plucked and flicked onto the bitty carpet while sat coil legged on the sofa, cup of coffee in one claw, cig in the other. He knew it was killing him, but the maidens’ were a crutch he needed to clear the crap, grey gunk he called it, or useless mucus, the mood which deadened his brain the second his eyes opened to the damp on his walls and grey outside the window. By 3:30pm the caffeine hit pupa-deep and he wanted distraction. So he switched on the laptop and clicked online, but not for Sasha Knox and a tongue twirling around her ass. Instead he wanted fairytales, something unreal to take his mind from four stained walls and dullness.
He placed the cursor over a link flashing ‘poeta de soledad’, clicked through the text and up on the screen flashed an old man’s face in a black and white photo. Bushy moustache covering his upper lip and three wise lines etched across his forehead, he blinked at Qwertyman who noticed a rooster slouched upon the man’s head. He knew those eyes have seen humanity crumble and rebuild itself, and hold insights to unearth meaning below the surface of faces, animals, technology and words. How many deaths have those eyes shed tears for? How many jilts? Eyes, which even constructed as pixels on a laptop screen, made Qwertyman feel obliged to shed the negative thoughts he’d been wallowing in since his mother’s death; beside other recent events which initiated his maggothood.
Inspired by the poets face, Qwertyman mustered his energy to squirm down stairs and into Mayfield Road, on what was a wet Friday evening in Whalley Range. His cylindrical shape ruffled puddles, on which yellow street lights glinted around each watery edge, as he looked at street corners for a chance prostitute. Just to see if she was worth a down-to-earth moment, when he’d find a dark wall in a corner, mechanically fuck her, and then go home for a shower. It’s the stuff maggots do when in need. Besides, nobody else other than drug addicted women needing money for heroin would have sex with him. He slid his card into the ATM though, to see a one and three zeroes glaring in bright digits. He’d forgotten about the grand which had been snugly placed into his account, and upon seeing such an amount, his bored lowlife lust for a prostitute shrivelled.
Qwertyman rolled across wet pavements covered in putrefied leaves, streets desolate of that entity known as the general public, the blobby mass of legs, eyes and smiley teeth from who he wriggled clear. Raindrops trickled down his face to hang from his chin for a second; as he calculated how he’d use the money to obtain an experience in a faraway place and, and as the poet’s eyes told him to, to search for beautiful but terrifying nuances in solitude. He wanted to sit on a train while reading an endless novel, and so while street walking he set the plan to catch an immediate train to London that evening. I want to experience a picaresque and scribble my journey in a notepad. And he looked at his face in a parked jeep window and saw not a maggot but a strange man, with money and life possibilities opening before him. Except while he squirmed in the dark, the rest of the male universe snuggled against softened bosoms, suckled Friday night treats for warmth. Yet even with money in his bank, his maggoty mouth was banished from the orifice, teat and lip of not just beautiful women, but all of them.
He chanced the bright lights in Tesco Metro, picked up a lamb’s liver he wanted to rip at for supper. Maybe it was the money in his account, because even though he was still subhuman, a till-assistant flashed her blue eyelashes at him, a fluttering he decoded to mean she wanted his maggothood. Yet no wonder in his own observation he was dead from his posterior spiracles upwards, because even though he’d have crawled deserts bestrewn with clattering mousetraps to twist limb and bedsheet with her, he did nothing to accept her silent sex-message other than coil up at the counter and key her into his memory-bank for when languidly masturbating in the dank chrysalis of his bedsit.
Slouched in front of his laptop, a raw flush rouged his cheeks as he typed the phrase ‘train tickets to’ into a search box. His hand hung limp in the air like a ballroom crab, when, about to place his forth hooklet onto the L key and order his ticket - one click of the laptop and he’d be heading on a Pendolino to the densest six hundred square mile of living flesh upon this neurotic isle, dank London. But a spasm in his brain moved his hooklet one centimetre higher and so he pressed the P key to which ‘train tickets to Paris’ flashed before him. His heartbeat picked up a steady rhythm and sounded like a distant nightclub full of hyperventilating cattle, the bass faraway pumping in his ears as he fell into robotic motion and the phrase in the search box sold it to him. He tapped at keys to set the booking process for a return train to the French centre, the city where some of his heroes resided as ghosts in the masonry. Laptop rested on his cylindrical stomach, held in place by his fleshy maggot hooks for fingers, surprisingly dexterous as he keyed in number 3, the final digit, embossed on his card. Now all that was left was for his index hooklet to press Enter.
And squirm into the street again to get the tickets printed, which meant crawling to Grime Net in Whalley Range, paying for 30 minutes online to find computers didn’t have the software needed to print the train tickets. So a human-sized maggot haunted the streets some more by wriggling his segmented frame through Moss Side into Rusholme, to look for an internet cafe who’d print the fucking tickets. Up until a bespectacled till assistant, with glossy black tosh under which hid a buckled smile, handed him the printed tickets, Qwertyman felt his chest plate heat up and crack like ceramic. Paris of Myth here I crawl, he said in relief and his ears almost oozed out steam. A squirm through wet streets under a low moon and rhombus stars whose beams turned the maggot back into a man again. He negotiated the stairs to his garret, and from midnight he pruned, bathed, poked his spindle fingers between three shelves worth of laminated paperbacks’ to look for which book to take. At 04:45 he stubbed a spliff in an ashtray, nimbly packed his leather sack and the taxi beeped outside.
His mind bent back into maggot shape, a tired Qwertyman slouched on Antonio’s counter and ran his eyes down a felt-tip written menu scrawled on fat-splattered grey card. To get in the continental mood he asked for latte, but the guy with dark eyebrows rebuked him in a Middle Eastern tongue and force-handed him instant coffee in a plastic cup, which he paid for and drank half and decided it tasted of stale, yet recently boiled, ferret piss. Such were the tastebuds, sprouted but decayed, on the tongue of pupa manbeast.
The train pulled out of Piccadilly at 05:25. At the first jolt of wheels turning he had inkling he could hide his maggotness better in front of the transient people he was due to meet on his journey. He scribbled in his notebook a four page tract about the rolling motion of horses which he compared to the train wheels, hundreds galloping, thousands of hooves in plumes of speed and dust thundering in his blood between Manchester and Paris.
Sat on the train, a machine inactive yet hissing out thin jets of steam along Crewe platform, Qwertyman scribbled that he’d ‘stream through Polesworth in 30 minutes, the place I grew up. And the village where in the last four months I’d travelled twice, once to see my mother’s funeral, the other to send off an old friend. Crabby, who I knew when I had a body people didn’t loathe, who faded from my life, and then I had a text he’d faded from his own with a blow to his head. The guy who once told me my soul is what people know me for, or the indelible effect I have upon them. I never got my chance to dispute that with him again.’ How strange it must be, seeing your birthplace speed by at seventy miles per hour in the half-dark of an autumnal morning, knowing the ghosts of his bloodline and past were present in shadows, or the very dust of the village, sleeping beyond the window. And in the above passage we read what could be the origins, the paranoid crux of his alien craw which set him so far apart from crowds and other people.
The idea of a maggot, packing a leather satchel with Time Regained before trekking on a train from Whalley Range to Paris, is highly implausible. It is Kafkaesque at least. Yet without wanting to cross further boundaries of the believable and pastiche, it has to be told that it was the Upper Eye, and not the body, of this thirty-five year old bachelor that made him think he was a gigantic maggot. Exactly the type you find wriggling on a fish hook, but human sized and somehow managing to have a head, and hands and feet and eyes that told other people he wasn’t like them. A soul wasn’t so forthcoming amidst all that excessive skin, fluffy like dried tripe. Imagine a person rolled inside a rug made of pupa flesh which is divided into puffy segments by tight rope, circular swellings with one end flattened and bedaubed with squiggly-shaped lines delineating what could be a face or anus. This is what Qwertyman saw as he looked in the mirror when jolted from wall to shit-smeared wall in the train toilet. He sat and squeezed into the steel pan lamb kidneys he’d ripped at hours earlier, and wrote a tract in his notebook on how it took fifteen hours to grow from mammal into maggot, and an eternity to revert back into human form again. A quick transformation compared to the seven months since he’d visited the same city in human skin, accompanied by a woman. He rummaged with his groin to secure a package of marijuana he’d strapped onto his scrotum using a cock-ring.
Three toddlers screamed at the pink, fleshy thing after he’d opened the toilet door and was squirming back to his seat. Dust-balls on the tips of his cartilaginous claws was a minor grotesquery in the buckled flesh which arrested passengers silent attention, as two parents were too embarrassed to acknowledge while one explained to the hysterical offspring about cruel fate of human’s who suffer metamorphic deformity. It was a lonely life being a maggot, wriggling into crowds within which everyone at hand gawked, but just never via the eyes of a lusting woman. Yet this sufferer shuffled back into his seat with adrenalin fizzing through the odd ventricle due to the destination being Paris, his favourite city.
He filled the window seat with his imagined flesh for the rest of the trip, and snuggled up close to an Oriental commuter (who glanced at our protagonist so swiftly our maggot was unable to obtain eye contact), resting his Proustcrieff novel onto his elongated torso to snooze between reading how memory and time adds variable texture to a pumping human brain.
Ginger-tipped bristles grew out his cheeks, which he plucked and flicked onto the bitty carpet while sat coil legged on the sofa, cup of coffee in one claw, cig in the other. He knew it was killing him, but the maidens’ were a crutch he needed to clear the crap, grey gunk he called it, or useless mucus, the mood which deadened his brain the second his eyes opened to the damp on his walls and grey outside the window. By 3:30pm the caffeine hit pupa-deep and he wanted distraction. So he switched on the laptop and clicked online, but not for Sasha Knox and a tongue twirling around her ass. Instead he wanted fairytales, something unreal to take his mind from four stained walls and dullness.
He placed the cursor over a link flashing ‘poeta de soledad’, clicked through the text and up on the screen flashed an old man’s face in a black and white photo. Bushy moustache covering his upper lip and three wise lines etched across his forehead, he blinked at Qwertyman who noticed a rooster slouched upon the man’s head. He knew those eyes have seen humanity crumble and rebuild itself, and hold insights to unearth meaning below the surface of faces, animals, technology and words. How many deaths have those eyes shed tears for? How many jilts? Eyes, which even constructed as pixels on a laptop screen, made Qwertyman feel obliged to shed the negative thoughts he’d been wallowing in since his mother’s death; beside other recent events which initiated his maggothood.
Inspired by the poets face, Qwertyman mustered his energy to squirm down stairs and into Mayfield Road, on what was a wet Friday evening in Whalley Range. His cylindrical shape ruffled puddles, on which yellow street lights glinted around each watery edge, as he looked at street corners for a chance prostitute. Just to see if she was worth a down-to-earth moment, when he’d find a dark wall in a corner, mechanically fuck her, and then go home for a shower. It’s the stuff maggots do when in need. Besides, nobody else other than drug addicted women needing money for heroin would have sex with him. He slid his card into the ATM though, to see a one and three zeroes glaring in bright digits. He’d forgotten about the grand which had been snugly placed into his account, and upon seeing such an amount, his bored lowlife lust for a prostitute shrivelled.
Qwertyman rolled across wet pavements covered in putrefied leaves, streets desolate of that entity known as the general public, the blobby mass of legs, eyes and smiley teeth from who he wriggled clear. Raindrops trickled down his face to hang from his chin for a second; as he calculated how he’d use the money to obtain an experience in a faraway place and, and as the poet’s eyes told him to, to search for beautiful but terrifying nuances in solitude. He wanted to sit on a train while reading an endless novel, and so while street walking he set the plan to catch an immediate train to London that evening. I want to experience a picaresque and scribble my journey in a notepad. And he looked at his face in a parked jeep window and saw not a maggot but a strange man, with money and life possibilities opening before him. Except while he squirmed in the dark, the rest of the male universe snuggled against softened bosoms, suckled Friday night treats for warmth. Yet even with money in his bank, his maggoty mouth was banished from the orifice, teat and lip of not just beautiful women, but all of them.
He chanced the bright lights in Tesco Metro, picked up a lamb’s liver he wanted to rip at for supper. Maybe it was the money in his account, because even though he was still subhuman, a till-assistant flashed her blue eyelashes at him, a fluttering he decoded to mean she wanted his maggothood. Yet no wonder in his own observation he was dead from his posterior spiracles upwards, because even though he’d have crawled deserts bestrewn with clattering mousetraps to twist limb and bedsheet with her, he did nothing to accept her silent sex-message other than coil up at the counter and key her into his memory-bank for when languidly masturbating in the dank chrysalis of his bedsit.
Slouched in front of his laptop, a raw flush rouged his cheeks as he typed the phrase ‘train tickets to’ into a search box. His hand hung limp in the air like a ballroom crab, when, about to place his forth hooklet onto the L key and order his ticket - one click of the laptop and he’d be heading on a Pendolino to the densest six hundred square mile of living flesh upon this neurotic isle, dank London. But a spasm in his brain moved his hooklet one centimetre higher and so he pressed the P key to which ‘train tickets to Paris’ flashed before him. His heartbeat picked up a steady rhythm and sounded like a distant nightclub full of hyperventilating cattle, the bass faraway pumping in his ears as he fell into robotic motion and the phrase in the search box sold it to him. He tapped at keys to set the booking process for a return train to the French centre, the city where some of his heroes resided as ghosts in the masonry. Laptop rested on his cylindrical stomach, held in place by his fleshy maggot hooks for fingers, surprisingly dexterous as he keyed in number 3, the final digit, embossed on his card. Now all that was left was for his index hooklet to press Enter.
And squirm into the street again to get the tickets printed, which meant crawling to Grime Net in Whalley Range, paying for 30 minutes online to find computers didn’t have the software needed to print the train tickets. So a human-sized maggot haunted the streets some more by wriggling his segmented frame through Moss Side into Rusholme, to look for an internet cafe who’d print the fucking tickets. Up until a bespectacled till assistant, with glossy black tosh under which hid a buckled smile, handed him the printed tickets, Qwertyman felt his chest plate heat up and crack like ceramic. Paris of Myth here I crawl, he said in relief and his ears almost oozed out steam. A squirm through wet streets under a low moon and rhombus stars whose beams turned the maggot back into a man again. He negotiated the stairs to his garret, and from midnight he pruned, bathed, poked his spindle fingers between three shelves worth of laminated paperbacks’ to look for which book to take. At 04:45 he stubbed a spliff in an ashtray, nimbly packed his leather sack and the taxi beeped outside.
His mind bent back into maggot shape, a tired Qwertyman slouched on Antonio’s counter and ran his eyes down a felt-tip written menu scrawled on fat-splattered grey card. To get in the continental mood he asked for latte, but the guy with dark eyebrows rebuked him in a Middle Eastern tongue and force-handed him instant coffee in a plastic cup, which he paid for and drank half and decided it tasted of stale, yet recently boiled, ferret piss. Such were the tastebuds, sprouted but decayed, on the tongue of pupa manbeast.
The train pulled out of Piccadilly at 05:25. At the first jolt of wheels turning he had inkling he could hide his maggotness better in front of the transient people he was due to meet on his journey. He scribbled in his notebook a four page tract about the rolling motion of horses which he compared to the train wheels, hundreds galloping, thousands of hooves in plumes of speed and dust thundering in his blood between Manchester and Paris.
Sat on the train, a machine inactive yet hissing out thin jets of steam along Crewe platform, Qwertyman scribbled that he’d ‘stream through Polesworth in 30 minutes, the place I grew up. And the village where in the last four months I’d travelled twice, once to see my mother’s funeral, the other to send off an old friend. Crabby, who I knew when I had a body people didn’t loathe, who faded from my life, and then I had a text he’d faded from his own with a blow to his head. The guy who once told me my soul is what people know me for, or the indelible effect I have upon them. I never got my chance to dispute that with him again.’ How strange it must be, seeing your birthplace speed by at seventy miles per hour in the half-dark of an autumnal morning, knowing the ghosts of his bloodline and past were present in shadows, or the very dust of the village, sleeping beyond the window. And in the above passage we read what could be the origins, the paranoid crux of his alien craw which set him so far apart from crowds and other people.
The idea of a maggot, packing a leather satchel with Time Regained before trekking on a train from Whalley Range to Paris, is highly implausible. It is Kafkaesque at least. Yet without wanting to cross further boundaries of the believable and pastiche, it has to be told that it was the Upper Eye, and not the body, of this thirty-five year old bachelor that made him think he was a gigantic maggot. Exactly the type you find wriggling on a fish hook, but human sized and somehow managing to have a head, and hands and feet and eyes that told other people he wasn’t like them. A soul wasn’t so forthcoming amidst all that excessive skin, fluffy like dried tripe. Imagine a person rolled inside a rug made of pupa flesh which is divided into puffy segments by tight rope, circular swellings with one end flattened and bedaubed with squiggly-shaped lines delineating what could be a face or anus. This is what Qwertyman saw as he looked in the mirror when jolted from wall to shit-smeared wall in the train toilet. He sat and squeezed into the steel pan lamb kidneys he’d ripped at hours earlier, and wrote a tract in his notebook on how it took fifteen hours to grow from mammal into maggot, and an eternity to revert back into human form again. A quick transformation compared to the seven months since he’d visited the same city in human skin, accompanied by a woman. He rummaged with his groin to secure a package of marijuana he’d strapped onto his scrotum using a cock-ring.
Three toddlers screamed at the pink, fleshy thing after he’d opened the toilet door and was squirming back to his seat. Dust-balls on the tips of his cartilaginous claws was a minor grotesquery in the buckled flesh which arrested passengers silent attention, as two parents were too embarrassed to acknowledge while one explained to the hysterical offspring about cruel fate of human’s who suffer metamorphic deformity. It was a lonely life being a maggot, wriggling into crowds within which everyone at hand gawked, but just never via the eyes of a lusting woman. Yet this sufferer shuffled back into his seat with adrenalin fizzing through the odd ventricle due to the destination being Paris, his favourite city.
He filled the window seat with his imagined flesh for the rest of the trip, and snuggled up close to an Oriental commuter (who glanced at our protagonist so swiftly our maggot was unable to obtain eye contact), resting his Proustcrieff novel onto his elongated torso to snooze between reading how memory and time adds variable texture to a pumping human brain.
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