The Rot of Wallow Mackay

That spring, two butterflies lay their eggs in Wallow’s house and by the onset of summer, she couldn’t see her carpet for caterpillars.

“I can have a look after my honeymoon,” Pest Control told her the fifth and final time she phoned that month. The two butterflies, one scarlet, one blue flitted around Wallow in a courtship dance, and when she batted them away, her phone flew from her hand, swallowed by the pool of caterpillars writhing beneath her feet. The first line of Here Comes the Bride wafted, distorted, up from the mire, then cut quiet. Ruefully, Wallow crossed to the window for some fresh air. She sat on the sill and tried to read her book, but caterpillars kept creeping across the page and the two butterflies perched, watchful, on the spine; by sunset, she’d barely read a page. Exhausted, she retired to her bedroom for an early night. If she lay still enough, she thought, she could ignore the hairy legs clawing at her skin.

The air was thick and hot the next day, and Wallow had a prickling in her skull that she couldn’t quite reach to scratch. How could she focus on her book like this? She burrowed through her hair in front of the bathroom mirror to try and find the rash, but her reflection was obscured by the swarm of caterpillars shuffling across the glass. She dug out the old landline from the writhing mound on the table and guessed the doctor’s number from memory.

“Curl Up and Dye Salon, how can I help?” sang the receptionist. Wallow winced as a caterpillar inched up her neck, and ended the call without saying a word

There must be a way around it, she decided: she pointed a bottle of bleach at the mirror to kill them off in a few decisive shots, but when she squeezed the nozzle, liquid only trickled from it and scalded her fingers. At least the taps still ran clean. As the sun set that night, she drowned the caterpillars coating her bathtub, and filled it to the brim with cold water to wash away the itching sweat, scrubbing at her scalp with a bar of soap until it bled. On the ceiling, the caterpillars wove webs upon webs of cocoons, and the two butterflies goaded her, winking their wings in scarlet and blue.

Wallow slept uneasily. In her dreams, her fingernails sprouted wings and fluttered away through prison bars on her bedroom window, off into the stars. She awoke mid-afternoon, sticky and cold.

Her skull pulsed and burned: she was certain that the caterpillars were carving through her brain. Drowsily, she crossed to the bathroom mirror. Cocoons swung softly from the bottom of the frame; the glass was streaked, but undisturbed. She buried through her hair, slowly, methodically – nothing! Her scalp looked completely normal. She tugged the cocoons off her laptop, and composed an email to the doctors explaining her symptoms. She hesitated over the send button – did it all sound too far-fetched? – and, with a pleasant beep, the screen fizzled out.

Where the hell was her charger? The sea of caterpillars dried up, Wallow realised half her possessions had been discarded on the floor among the wasteland of dust and dead flies. There! But when she went to plug it in, she found the socket suspended by chewed-up cables, cocoons sheltering static in the hole it had once inhabited.

Wallow tried to get comfortable on the windowsill and read her book, but the words flitted away under her gaze. Her mind was blurry, consumed by the festering rot. She was so exhausted. Her book fell to the floor as she dozed off, too tired to dream.

The caterpillars dug their graves in Wallow’s bones as she slept, burrowing through her body, excavating what little of her there was left, consuming it with cannibalistic fervour. Wallow awoke with a start, smacking her head, suddenly, against the wall, squashed flat like an overripe plum. Woozily, she shuffled to the floor and wobbled to the bathroom mirror, her flesh sinking and folding under her weight. Her vision was too blurred to see the gapes in her cheeks, her fingertips too dulled to feel them when she touched her face; relief fluttered in her chest. She squeezed fly eggs from a tube of face cream and finger-painted them lavishly on her peeling skin; she picked cocoons from the handles of drawers and hooked them through her ears as jewellery. She swayed on her feet and grinned at her reflection from cheekbone to cheekbone. When she smiled, she thought, you could hardly see the join.

She stood on her doorstep, eyes shut, and breathed in the heavy sunlight. Of course, there was no room left for air in her lungs.

A van trundled along the road and drew to a dull stop. Pest Control lumbered out, frowning at Wallow melting outside her house. He glanced at his satnav.

“Wallow MacKay?” he asked, hesitantly.

Wallow’s mouth lay agape in a sick imitation of a smile. Brown cocoons swayed from her blackened teeth. In startled horror, Pest Control stared as her eyelids peeled back and hordes of butterflies burst from the sockets; each cocoon unfurled in her mouth, filling it with frantic hair and scales and wings. She spat them out in fits of coughs: they were in her bones and her bowels and her brain and scratched and smacked at the inside of her skin until she burst like a balloon, her rotten flesh splattering across the infested house. The mass of insects gobbled her remains in a violent clash of scarlet and blue until all that remained of Wallow MacKay was a drop of festering blood where once she’d stood on the drive.

Pest Control batted a pair of butterflies away, and wiped a spot of rot from his clothes with a grimace. He watched the mob fluttering away down the street, dodging the setting sun in delightful scarlet and blue. Despite himself, he smiled. Beautiful, wasn’t it, when humans didn’t have to interfere with the course of nature? He couldn’t wait to get out of this line of work.

He climbed back in his van and trundled away. Wallow MacKay’s house was silent, empty, rotten and alone.