When the movers in yellow jackets empty your mother’s house into plastic-white U-Hauls, they call her a hoarder. They preface that she was not the kind that kept nests of vomit-green Christmas trees in the basement, but the kind that kept your warping, spice-smelling math test from fourth grade with its feathered, ghosting red ink because she wanted to show the grandkids that you, too, failed sometimes. You thank the movers for puzzling the kitchenware into metal tessellation in cardboard boxes—they strip the kitchen to honey-tinted oil stains and nothing more. And you help too: stuff decades-old puffer coats into translucent trash bags, hangers still attached; list her treddle machine on Facebook Marketplace for $25; scan stacks of browning pictures onto a thumb drive before shredding them four or five at a time into paper pollen…

​

But when you make it to her bedroom, the wallpaper stands stark like fire against the barren house. And grief finds you like maggots find you—slow and translucent at first—pale memories you swat away. But then it swarms in buzzing piles: worms under her quilt-sheet bed, between the ant-like notes in her floral diaries, inside the fuzzy fibers of her pale-pink house shoes. The single translucent bug turns into an entity, a hive mind prickling from your feet to your nose, dropping larvae and skittering carcasses into your mouth and ears and pupils. 

​

Lay on her bed and surrender yourself. Let the maggots feast on your bloated body—small pinpricks—decomposing you into a black, rotting stench.