The Morning After [Fly, Unbirth, Inflation, Maggots]
Part 2 of St.Patties Day Bug-Whore
Chapter 1 Link here
Shame
Maeve Brennan came back to the world on the cold tile of her bathroom floor, spine slotted like a jigsaw piece into the angle between the base of the tub and the wall. Her jaw vibrated with the pain of her own teeth grinding; she heard the click before she felt it. Her legs, bare and spattered with sticky sweat, were pulled up almost to her chin, but even so, her knees couldn’t meet—because of the belly.
The belly that wasn’t there yesterday.
She blinked. Her eyelids fought the decision and nearly won, but habit forced them open again. The green, glittery top that last night had seemed slutty and fun was now a straitjacket, the shimmery fabric drawn so tight across her stomach that the hem nearly split. Her belly—a domed, shiny orb—had migrated up from nothing, distending her navel into a sad, hard flare. The skin was flushed red, mapped with veins. When she touched it (she had to, couldn’t not), the surface was warm, alien, almost feverish. She pressed her palm flat against the taut expanse.
Something inside pushed back. Not a polite “hello,” but a slow-motion recoil, a suggestion of mass and intention.
Maeve gagged. Her tongue thickened and pressed up against her palate, bringing with it the aftertaste of the night: Guinness, cigarettes, and something sticky-sweet and chemical, like antifreeze dissolved in Jell-O. She ran her tongue along her teeth, feeling every crack and fill, and then realized her cheeks were already wet. Not with fresh tears—her ducts had done their job hours ago—but with the crusted, rehydrated run-off of the nightmare that had gotten her here.
She wiped the back of her hand across her face and left a greasy, blackish streak from ear to chin.
For a long time she lay there, staring at the ceiling and the cheap plastic light fixture that trembled with every second-floor footstep. She didn’t move, didn’t dare. Across the bathroom, perched on the lip of the sink with its back to her, the fly was doing something fastidious and private with its forelegs, the iridescent green of its abdomen catching the light like a spill of motor oil. It had not looked at her once. The weight inside her shifted slightly, and she experienced the physical memory of every sex ed video she’d ever seen, the ones with diagrams of fetuses and uteruses and never once, in all those years, anything like this.
Eventually, she needed to know. Needed to do the thing, or die not knowing. With the arm that hurt less, she reached for her phone, which lay face-down on the grout beside her left foot. Picking it up was like retrieving an oar from the ocean in a full gale. Her muscles trembled and her fingers slipped on the glass, but finally she cradled the phone like a wounded mouse in both hands.
Fourteen missed calls.
Three from Brian. The rest from numbers she didn’t recognize. She scrolled to the messaging app, ignoring the pounding in her temples. On the group thread, her last video was still at the top. Three blue ticks beneath the message: Brian had watched it. More than once, maybe. Maeve imagined his face, that half-moon of disapproval, and then forced herself to stop. That was the only mercy she would allow herself before noon.
She flipped the phone face-down again, then risked a glance through the open bathroom door. Across the apartment, the sheets on her futon were twisted into the shape of a crashed zeppelin. The fabric was marked by a single, massive iridescent smear—turquoise, purple, gold. It looked like the inside of an abalone shell, or the surface of an oil spill, and it glistened even in the bruised daylight of her east-facing window.
The air was rank with something organic and faintly fermented, as if a forgotten fruit rind had become sentient and now plotted revenge. Maeve remembered, with a microsecond of queasy joy, that it was not, in fact, a dream. The fly—she refused to call it “the father,” not even in her most unguarded moments—was real.
On her phone, a new notification pinged. She ignored it, but it repeated. In the end, curiosity won. It was a text, from a contact labeled “CIARÁN’S COUSIN (WORK)” and it read, simply: Don’t come in. Don’t come back.
Maeve snorted. She set the phone down gently this time, as if any sudden movement might trigger labor. She remembered: rent due in eleven days. She thought about the deposit, about the cost of clinics, about calling Mam back home, about the consequences stacked up like Jenga blocks one bad breath from collapse.
Her stomach burbled, a subsonic throb that reverberated up her throat.
“No hospital,” she muttered. “No Mam. Get up. Shower. Find something that fits.”
It was the old mantra, the one that got her through every college final and every breakup, and even the night she learned Brian had slept with her roommate on her own futon. It worked now, too. She rolled to her knees, ignoring the searing pull in her abdomen, and used the edge of the tub to lever herself upright.
The bathroom mirror was positioned so that you could see only from the nose up, which was a kindness. Her hair was a halo of dried sweat, auburn at the roots and chartreuse at the tips from last night’s “festive” spray-on color. Her eyes were two radioactive emeralds. She grinned at her own reflection, the effect ghoulish but not without charm.
When she stood, the belly shifted again, a slow gravitational wave that rolled her center of gravity forward. She braced on the wall, then stepped delicately over the pile of dirty clothes (jeans, panties, socks all stuck together with something crystalline and unfamiliar). She shambled to the shower and turned on the water, which shrieked in the pipes like a dying cat. The sound nearly made her cry.
As she waited for the water to warm, she caught her reflection in the mirrored medicine cabinet. Now that she was upright, the pregnancy was even more obvious—she looked six months along, maybe more, if the thing inside her obeyed human clocks. She pressed both hands to the orb again, tracing the faintest outline of a ridge or seam beneath the skin. Her navel, an outie now, pulsed with each heartbeat.
“Fuck me,” she whispered. “You really went and did it, didn’t you?”
The belly twitched, a ripple under the flesh. Maeve flinched, then laughed. The sound was rusty, but it worked.
“Right, then,” she said to the empty room, “let’s not make it weirder than it already is.”
She peeled off the top with difficulty; the fabric stuck to her skin, and when it finally gave, she nearly toppled backward. Her breasts, always on the small side, were now swollen and flushed, nipples dark and tender. She took a moment to assess, then shrugged. At least she could check “big tits” off her bucket list.
She stepped into the shower. The first blast of water made her shriek, but soon the sting dulled to a numbing roar. She scrubbed herself down with cheap bar soap, feeling the topography of her own body as if for the first time. The lines of old bruises, the sharp and sudden rise of the new belly, the quivering muscles in her thighs. She washed between her legs, half-expecting to find something still lodged there, but all she encountered was the normal roughness of her own pubic stubble.
She let herself stand under the water until the heat ran out, and then a little longer. When she emerged, toweling her hair with a shirt from the floor, she felt almost human. Not normal, not even close, but human in the sense that she could maybe survive this day without becoming a tabloid headline.
Back in the main room, she surveyed the disaster zone that was her apartment. She had no idea where the fly had gone. Part of her was glad for the silence, part of her missed the attention. She was honest enough to admit it.
On her phone, the notifications had stopped. Maeve picked it up, thumbed through the new ones. A single text from Mam, timestamped 6:42 a.m.: Love you pet. Don’t forget to wear green for the parade.
Maeve typed a reply, then erased it, then typed another. Finally she just sent a green heart emoji.
She had nothing in the fridge but a half-loaf of Wonder Bread and a single can of Red Bull. She ate a slice of bread plain, drank the Red Bull warm, and then sat on the edge of her futon, legs splayed, belly round and perfect in the hush of mid-morning.
She had never been good at planning. She was good at getting through, at improvising. This, she thought, was just one more test.
She opened her phone again, deleted the last video from the thread, and took a selfie. The face in the picture was pale, puffy, and wild, but the eyes were as green as a planet, and the belly in the foreground looked like the moon about to crash through her core.
She captioned it: Living my best life, xx
And for a minute, she believed it.
Then, with the patience of a hangover saint, she began to plot her escape.
Defiance
Maeve Brennan’s first attempt at dressing went about as well as an octopus trying to wear a bra: futile, panicked, and humiliating. Every motion made the thing inside her slosh and thud against the walls of her own skin, as if her womb were a washing machine with one brick in the load, set on the “delicate” cycle. She peeled the sticky shirt from her back, half-expecting to find something attached, some squirming afterbirth, but it was only her own sweat and the glimmer of dried gold glitter.
The shower was already running, sending up a fog that clung to the medicine cabinet and rendered her reflection impressionistic. She was grateful for that. When she stepped in, the water struck her belly first, hot and unrelenting. Maeve braced her arms against the plastic curtain, then surrendered. The pressure was like being wrapped in a warm sack, or perhaps in the mouth of a very attentive python.
She watched the steam swirl around her toes. Out of the corner of her eye, something darker moved—a flash of green and blue, a glinting jewel in the toilet’s shadow. The fly. It had followed her. It was stalking the rim, legs twitching in prayer, wings folded demurely, its bulk too big to pass for normal but not so massive as to seem impossible. As she watched, the fly pressed its face to the porcelain and began to clean itself, tongue lapping in slow, sensuous arcs.
Maeve tried to feel only revulsion, but her body mutinied. A pulse of wet heat from below, an almost… appreciative flutter, like the last shudder after a spectacular fuck. It was an outrage. She pressed her forehead to the tile and groaned.
“Yer feckin’ joking,” she spat, the words muffled by the coldness of the grout. “Not even one morning of peace, you mutant pervert.”
The fly made no reply, just rotated in a tight little circle, displaying the full glory of its iridescence. Maeve squeezed her thighs together, trying to squeeze the sensation out of existence. She soaped her body viciously, dug her nails into the flesh along her ribs, then risked a hand between her legs. She was tender and engorged, not just with the usual aftershock of a long night but with something else—something slippy and insistent.
She rinsed her hand and checked: nothing visible, just a slickness that felt thicker, more substantial than anything she’d ever produced on her own. She spread her labia, squinting, and saw it: a clot of cream-white mucus, textured like the filling of a bad cannoli, studded with a faint pattern of grains. Maggots, her brain supplied, and she nearly fell backward out of the shower.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she hissed. She plucked the thing away, dropped it onto the drain, and watched the hot water break it up. The mass split into half a dozen tiny, squirming lines, each one wriggling for only a moment before the heat cooked it into stillness.
Maeve took it as a small comfort that at least her plumbing was superior to the average garden slug. She rinsed, then rinsed again, then stood under the water until her fingertips turned numb and her scalp started to tingle. When she stepped out, she wrapped a towel around her midsection like a makeshift papoose, gathering the loose ends and flareting them tight above her navel. The swelling had advanced since the hour before—her skin now looked painted-on, her navel fully everted, the veins beneath her flesh a thready river system pulsing blue and green.
She dried herself, then finger-combed her hair into something that read “presentable” if you were legally blind and in a hurry. She rummaged the bottom of her wardrobe and found an old band shirt—black and oversized—and a pair of leggings that still had some stretch in the waistband. She pulled the shirt over her head and let it drape over the belly, trying to flatten the curve. The effect was comical; she looked like a very hungover balloon artist or the world’s youngest soccer mom, depending on the angle.
Maeve caught her own reflection in the bedroom mirror. She almost laughed. Then the fly waddled out of the bathroom—unhurried, disgusting, obscenely pleased with itself—and the laugh curdled somewhere between her chest and her throat.
“You’re a right piece of work,” she told it. She wasn’t entirely sure she wasn’t talking to herself.
Her purse was still on the coffee table where she’d left it, gaping open, the interior dark and wet-smelling. She upended it over the trash: a wallet, a half-used pack of gum, her keys, and a slow pour of last night that landed with a sound she would not describe to anyone. She looked at the fly. “The least you could do,” she said, “is clean up a bit.” The fly cleaned its face with one hooked foreleg, methodically, as if it already had.
Outside, the building’s corridor was empty except for the usual smell of burnt food and Febreze. Maeve took the stairs one at a time, feeling the extra weight with every step. The lower half of her body was a pendulum, swinging forward and forward again, never letting her forget the presence of the invader.
At street level, she found the day fully in progress. The block was full of cars, children, dogs, the sound of some very distant but very angry music. Her first instinct was to keep her head down, but the sun was too bright, and she needed air. She turned left, then right, then headed toward the pharmacy on the main road.
It was only half a block before the first woman stopped her. She was a decade older, maybe two, with perfect teeth and a stroller so big it could carry a grown man in a pinch.
“How far along?” the woman asked, her voice sugar and sunshine. Maeve nearly missed the question, assuming it was for someone else.
She blinked, then realized the woman was staring at her belly.
“six months,” Maeve lied, because “I just fucked a mutant fly and I think it laid its eggs in me” was not a conversation starter she cared to try.
“Wow! You look incredible. Barely showing anywhere else,” the woman cooed. She reached out as if to touch Maeve’s arm, then thought better of it. “Do you know what you’re having?”
Maeve shook her head, unsure whether to say “larvae” or just stick with “surprise.”
“First one?” the woman pressed.
“Yeah,” Maeve said. “Just, you know, wanted to see if I could do it.”
The woman laughed, like it was the most relatable thing in the world. “Oh, honey, the first is always the scariest. But you’re going to love it. There’s nothing like being a mom.”
Maeve managed a smile. “I’ll take your word for it.”
The woman drifted on, wheels squeaking. Maeve stood for a moment, hands pressed flat over her belly. For the first time, the fullness didn’t feel wholly alien. She imagined it—herself, as a mother, shuffling through a morning like this, buying juice and diapers, maybe giving her own little monster the talk about not eating paste. The thought was half nightmare, half hope, and it rattled in her skull as she resumed walking.
She was sweating by the time she reached the intersection. The belly was heavier than it looked; it wasn’t just mass but a weird centrifugal energy that made turning corners a circus act. Maeve found a bench in the tiny, sad park by the bus stop and collapsed onto it, splaying her legs and letting her arms dangle.
The world moved around her, at a pace just a click faster than her own. Mothers pushed strollers, fathers threw balls for their dogs, children screamed and tumbled and occasionally bled. Maeve watched it all and felt like she was in a snow globe, the glass just thick enough to keep out the real weather.
A little girl in a bright yellow raincoat ran past, holding hands with a boy her own age. They shrieked with laughter as they tried to catch the pigeons that were too bored even to fly away. Their mother followed behind, shouting half-heartedly, a coffee in one hand, a phone in the other. She looked up, made eye contact with Maeve, and smiled.
Maeve smiled back, but her face didn’t quite catch up to the emotion. The mother turned away, and the kids kept running, circling the bench in wider and wider orbits.
Maeve looked down at her belly. She let her palm rest on top, not to comfort it, but to assert ownership. For a second, the skin seemed to pulse beneath her hand. She thought about what might be inside—how many, what shapes, what hungers. She wondered if they’d come out looking like her, or like it.
She snorted at her own melodrama. Probably just a disaster of blood and mucus, followed by a night in county lockup or the ER. There was no way this ended with a christening.
Still, she found herself reluctant to stand up. The bench was shaped just right, supporting her hips and her legs, and in the warmth of the late morning, it was almost comfortable. Maeve closed her eyes, just for a second.
When she opened them, twenty minutes had passed, and the world had shifted: more children, more noise, more mothers and fathers and the little dramas of the street. Maeve took a deep breath, tasted the aftersmell of dog shit and hot pretzel, and willed herself to move.
The pharmacy was just ahead, the fluorescent sign a low-resolution promise of solutions. Maeve rose, steadied herself, and walked toward it. She passed another woman, pregnant this time for real, and the woman gave her a smile so full of solidarity that Maeve almost burst out laughing.
She wondered if she would ever fit in among them. If, someday, she might forget the feel of her own body being violated by something not of this earth. She doubted it, but the day was young.
The bells over the pharmacy door chimed, and Maeve stepped inside, already rehearsing what she’d say to the pharmacist.
She decided to go with “It’s a medical emergency. I need to not be pregnant anymore.” The rest, she’d improvise.
Resignation
The pharmacy was as bright and hostile as a hospital waiting room, all clinical whites and the eye-punishing blue of discount carpet. Maeve drifted through the aisles, glancing at boxes of diapers and vitamins, feeling the whole place conspire to remind her of her situation. She paused in front of the pregnancy tests—not because she needed one, but to sneer at the grinning, glowing women on the boxes. None of them looked like they’d ever spent the night with a mutant fly.
She queued up at the pharmacy counter. The pharmacist was a small, angular man with the beard of someone who’d never fully committed to facial hair. His name tag read “Gary.” He looked at Maeve, then at her belly, then back at her face. His nose wrinkled as if in anticipation of the worst.
“Hi. I need, um—Plan B,” she said, keeping her voice low and urgent.
Gary tilted his head. “That only works up to seventy-two hours, you know,” he said, voice flat. “When was your last—”
“Night before last,” Maeve lied, shaving twelve hours off the truth. “I just want to be sure.”
He squinted, then reached for a box under the counter. “It’s not going to work if you’re already—”
Maeve forced a laugh. “Just playing it safe, Gary. Gotta hedge my bets.” She slid her debit card across the glass.
Gary didn’t smile. He scanned the box, then hesitated. “You… you’re not on any other medications, are you?”
“Nothing that matters,” Maeve lied again.
He set the box in a plain brown paper bag and handed it over. The exchange was antiseptic, as if he were passing a prescription for rat poison to an actual rat.
Maeve took the bag and turned, then stopped. “Do you have, like, something for—” She made a vague circling motion at her belly, hoping he’d fill in the rest.
Gary blinked. “Prenatal vitamins?”
“Like, the opposite of that,” Maeve said. “Something for cramps or bloating.”
His frown deepened. “If you’re experiencing significant pain or swelling, you should see a doctor. Urgently.”
“I just need to get through the weekend,” Maeve said, a ragged edge under the joke.
He stared at her a long moment, then wrote something on a slip of paper and handed it across the counter. An address. “They do walk-ins. Sliding scale.”
She took it, crumpled it in her fist, and nodded. “Thanks,” she said, and meant it, sort of.
Out on the sidewalk, the air was heavier. Maeve ducked into the mouth of an alley two doors down, pressed her forehead to a sticky brick wall, and let herself sob, silent and guttural. Her belly pressed against her knees, the skin so taut it felt like it might split if she inhaled too hard. She wished for a cigarette, or a bottle of whiskey, or a time machine.
“Fuck it,” she muttered. “I guess we’ll see if they come out on their own.”
She wiped her face with the heel of her hand and straightened. There was only one thing left to do. She walked another block, found a dingy corner store, and bought a cheap bottle of gin and a disposable douche with the last of her cash. The woman at the counter looked at her, at her belly, and then at the gin. No comment, just rang her up and said, “Have a blessed day.”
Maeve carried the bag home like it was radioactive, a bundle of hope and futility all at once. She kept her eyes on the pavement and tried not to think about the next hour, or the next day, or the rest of her life.
On her way up the stairwell, she paused, hand on her belly, and made a silent promise:
This would not be the end of her story.
Not if she had anything to say about it.
Bargaining
The first thing Maeve did when she got home was check the apartment for the fly. Nothing. Just a faint crust of dried resin on the toilet rim.
“Figures,” she said, not even bothering to lower her voice. “He gets his rocks off and fucks off forever. Typical man.”
The belly was heavier now, a weight that seemed to drag her forward even as she leaned back against the chipped bathroom counter. She needed to pee, urgently, but the act itself felt like trying to pour out of a traffic cone—narrow, endless, and ultimately unsatisfying. When she finally managed, the stream was cloudy and viscous, and at the very end, a single, wriggling maggot plopped into the water with a microscopic splash.
Maeve watched it curl and uncurl, white as a pearl, already paddling for the drain. She shivered, then pinched it with a wad of toilet paper and flushed, holding the handle down for a full ten seconds to be sure.
Next: the douche. She ripped open the package like a savage, filled the bulb with warm water, and knelt on the bathmat. When she squeezed, the pressure made her groan, but a tide of slime and microscopic grubs sluiced out of her and into the bowl, each pulse stinging like she’d dunked her crotch in hot gin. She gave herself a second round, just to be sure. Afterward, she sat on the lid and caught her breath, palms pressed to her knees, head bowed as if in prayer.
The world, she decided, was disgusting and indifferent. It would not mourn her if she died tomorrow, nor would it throw her a parade if she survived. The only thing left was to eat something.
Maeve washed her hands for a long time, then dialed up the local pizza place and ordered two larges, one with anchovies and jalapeños, the other with extra pineapple. She wanted flavors that would burn the memory out of her mouth.
While she waited, she popped the cap on the gin and took three huge gulps, wincing at the burn. She didn’t bother with a glass.
She sat on her futon, but not upright; she flipped the cushion to the less-stained side and lay across it with her feet dangling off the armrest. The TV was already on, tuned to a documentary about the “Joy of Motherhood” narrated by a man with a fake British accent. Maeve watched a montage of glowing women stroking their bumps and smiling at ultrasound screens, all hope and pastel light.
When the first commercial break arrived, Maeve snorted gin through her nose. The irony was too rich; the television showed a plump, cherubic blonde in a pink maternity smock, floating an ultrasound photo toward the camera like a peace offering. “Every woman’s journey is beautiful,” the voiceover droned, the vowels round and lush. Maeve laughed so hard she almost blacked out.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she shouted, only then realizing her window was open to the street. “Is this what passes for a sign?” She cackled, then pointed her middle finger at the ceiling, at the god that wasn’t, at the fly and its maggoty progeny, at anyone who might be listening. “Go fuck yourself, for real,” she said, raising the bottle in a ragged toast.
It felt good—honest, bracing. She guzzled another slosh of gin and let herself slide further down the futon, lost in the warm undertow of alcohol and disbelief. Was this rock bottom? Hard to tell. The pizza arrived before she could decide. She peeled herself off the upholstery, threw on a bathrobe, and fished a crumpled twenty from her purse.
On the other side of the door, the pizza kid wore a beanie and the look of someone who’d seen it all already. He handed off the boxes without comment, but his gaze did flick down to the bulge under Maeve’s robe, up to the chartreuse roots in her hair, and finally back to the bottle in her hand. She grinned, her teeth sticky with booze, and he took a half step back.
“Not a word,” she said.
He gave her a mock salute and vanished down the hallway.
Maeve settled back on the futon, cradling the two hot boxes like babies. She ate slice after slice, alternating anchovy with pineapple, letting the salt and acid scald her mouth clean. With each mouthful, she imagined the little bastards inside her—whether they tasted what she did, if they ticked and writhed in outrage at the intrusion, or if they relished it, too. She ran her palm over the curve of her stomach and rolled a wedge of pineapple between her molars.
“You all like that, huh?” she said, addressing the belly. “Better get used to it. World’s nothing but disappointment and carbs.”
Later, with the television casting sepia shadows across the room and her mind fogged with food and alcohol, Maeve set her empty plate down and watched the veins on her abdomen pulse in lazy rhythm. Something pressed back, a gentle but unmistakable thud—like a miniature fist, or a snout, or a wish.
A thought flickered through her: what if she simply... let it happen? No more panic. No more violent purges or Plan B or clawing for the past. Just give in to the dumb, relentless forward motion and see who emerged at the other end.
She found herself half-laughing, half-crying at the idea. Her body already bowed to pressure—always had, always would. Maybe her soul wasn’t so different. There was a strange dignity in going through with it. Her belly rose and fell with each shallow breath, the skin stretched almost translucent, the veins beneath like some kind of subway map.
She watched the TV, not really seeing it, just listening to the parade of women talk about what it meant to be a mother. The cliches went past in waves: “It’s the hardest job in the world.” “You never know what true love is until you hold your baby.” “Nothing prepares you for it.”
Maeve snorted. “Nothing prepares you for being a maggot farm, either.”
She drank more. She couldn’t stop thinking about the fly. Where had it gone? Did it just buzz off to the next girl on the block, or did it die after breeding? Was she supposed to feel sorry for it?
No. She was supposed to feel sorry for herself. But she couldn’t, not really. There was a numbness settling over her, a chemical detachment from the entire project of existence. Even the maggots didn’t bother her as much as they should. She wondered if this was what true motherhood was like: surrender, resignation, the absence of fear.
The TV flickered, then cut to an ad for life insurance. Maeve reached for the remote, missed it, and sent it spinning under the table.
She lay there for a while, the pizza boxes gone cold and the gin bottle nearly empty. She watched the ceiling swirl and crack, the lines in the plaster shifting like the tracks of bored snails. She started to drift, not quite asleep, just numb and suspended, floating above her own disaster.
When she roused herself, it was dark. The streetlights outside painted her window in stripes. The apartment was silent, except for the distant hum of the refrigerator and the soft, regular pulse of her own heartbeat.
She felt the hunger again, not for food, but for contact, for something wet and violent and real. She dragged herself to the bedroom, peeled off her shirt, and collapsed onto the sheets.
They were still sticky from the night before. The memory made her shudder, but not enough to stop.
She reached for her vibrator, a cheap purple bullet from the bodega two doors down. She pressed it to her clit, turned it on, and waited for the sensation to build. Nothing. Just a dead spot, numb and useless, like her whole body had staged a walkout.
She swore, rolled onto her side, and tried again. This time, she let her fingers wander down to the folds of her labia, searching for any sign of life. She found only the goopy residue from earlier, a sour, slippery mucus that clung to her skin and wouldn’t wash away.
She dipped her fingers into it anyway, then pressed them inside herself, half curious, half desperate. The sensation was equal parts gross and electric, and for a second she felt a flare of the old pleasure.
She moaned, louder than she meant to. “Fuck it,” she said. “If this is what I am now, may as well enjoy it.”
She rocked her hips against her hand for a while, then stopped. The ceiling kept doing its thing. She tried again, lost the thread, and gave up. The vibrator had rolled somewhere. She didn’t look for it. Her fingers were still there but they’d gone stupid and slow, and at some point she realized she was just lying there with her hand between her legs, not doing anything, thinking about the fly.
She pulled the covers up. The sheets smelled like last night. She stared at the window until the streetlight stripes started to crawl, and then she closed her eyes, and the room tilted, and she let it.
She still needed something. She couldn’t have said what, exactly. Just—more. Different. The fly’s face kept surfacing behind her eyelids, those ridiculous multifaceted eyes, and she didn’t push it away.
She pulled on a hoodie and sweats, and slipped out into the night.