Jen pulled what had to be a body from the crawlspace. It was rolled up in plastic drop cloth, and trailed a dark puddle. She peeled back a layer to reveal a bloated face with a scraggly beard. Several maggots slithered out of its mouth. It was Joseph all right. The man she had replaced.
A fly grazed her lips.
She couldn’t exactly remember when or how it had happened. Flashbulb memories sometimes popped in her head of a slick hammer, scrubbing her arms in a hot shower. A confusing time period when she had looked much like he did, but slowly metamorphosed into her adult form. It was all so hazy. But life had moved on for Jen, and she soon settled into a routine that had lasted these past two years. 9am was standup for her remote backend job at a startup in Oakland. Work until lunch, pop down to the carts at the end of the block. Maybe soft call out at 4, play some video games, or if stumped on a particularly tough problem head down to the tea shop in the evening for some focus time. Jen rarely socialized with her three housemates, but she kept up her end of the cleaning necessary to maintain their rented 1920s faux Victorian home in the Sellwood neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Jen was quiet, kept to herself. No one had any complaints, or at least not ones they would say to her face.
Augusts in Portland weren’t what they used to be when Joseph had moved to the city, with temperatures now hitting the triple digits regularly. Jen had the house to herself that week, as her housemates had all bought tickets to Pickathon together. It didn’t bother her - much - that the offer hadn’t been extended to her, but no matter, Jen liked the solitude, and the freedom to walk around in her underwear all day. With no AC what else was she supposed to do?
Jen was about to give herself her weekly injection that Friday morning when the first fly had landed on her thigh. She went to swat at it, forgetting the syringe in her hand, and nearly haphazardly stabbed herself with the needle as the fly skittered away in a frenetic dance across her skin before taking flight. Later while typing out a message to a coworker, the fly buzzed under her nostril, then snuck behind her mechanical keyboard. She picked up the keyboard but couldn’t find it. Annoying. She finally killed the fly with a notebook against the small window in her room, but no sooner did she sit back down to her desk before another fly took its place, humming past her ear, kissing her cheek. Jen killed that fly, and another, and another. It seemed like there was always at least one ready to harass her.
Mercifully, it was time for lunch. Jen threw on some shorts and a pair of Joseph’s old Tevas and headed out to the taco cart. I bet Willow left some food out or something, she thought as she walked. Wouldn’t be the first time. The sun on 13th avenue was relentless, and the air had a slight taste of forest fire to it. Joseph’s old painter friend from Reed would have described the orangey haze as “atmospheric.” Jen remembered a night not too long ago when the two of them were drunk and the painter had made a sloppy pass at her. Frowning at the memory, she ordered carnitas from the cart, and while squeezing some limes over her tacos she noticed a fly casually wiggle its way off her in the air. A stowaway, she thought. After returning home, Willow’s room proved to be spotless, save for a THC vape pen on the floor that must have fallen out of their bag on the way out the door. Jen snuck a hit off it. She needed something to distract her from her growing irritation.
Returning to work, the tickets seemed dry and endless. Missing paginated responses for a query. Alphabetical sort was wrong on one of the site pages. A customer’s API key had started failing, and no one knew why. Jen got the sense that her teammates in the Bay were pretty checked out that day, nobody was getting back to her on ticket escalations. Not that Jen expected more, Joseph had taken the job as a way to slack off and it seemed like everyone else on the team had similar motivations and were probably not even working. Jen wasn’t alone, though: the flies had returned. Again it seemed to be a steady stream, understudies replacing each other one by one as Jen swatted them now and then against her increasingly guts-covered windowpane.
By the end of the workday, the flies had conditioned Jen to brush or slap at the smallest sensations on her body. A hair brushing her face, an itch, became a fly in her mind and she responded with irritation. She found herself tensing at small movements in her vision, like highlights catching the frame of her monitor. I’m an engineer, there’s gotta be a way to determine root cause, she thought. It was time to learn who her adversary was.
Jen downloaded a bug identifier app and used her phone to zoom in on one of the insects she had mashed against her desk. Conicera tibialis, the coffin fly, or scuttle fly, read her search result. From the family Phoridae. Known to eat decaying organic matter, these flies can dig up to two meters in the ground to enter coffins and lay their eggs within. Often a vector of disease, coffin flies are a common pest in older commercial buildings like restaurants, but almost never show up in residential settings.
What the fuck, thought Jen. Is something dead in the house?
She expanded the search to Drew and Ash’s rooms. Jen felt bad being this nosy, but how could she get anything done with this constant parade of corpse bugs dive bombing her face and hands? Intrusions into each of her housemates’ rooms turned up nothing: no food left out, no odd smells, and definitely no dead bodies. Maybe part of it was that the shot hadn’t fully kicked in yet, but there was a rage building in Jen against her elusive tormentors. These flies were really getting under her skin.
Jen examined the kitchen cupboards, using her phone as a flashlight. Nothing obvious in the hall closet, the bathroom, the mud room. She checked under the porch as best she could, and all she saw was gravel. Jen read a tip online to put drinking glasses over the drains to see if the flies were living in the pipes, but after an hour no flies had emerged. They still managed to find their way to her, doing their weird zigs and zags on surfaces and her body before arcing away. It was late afternoon, and Jen needed a breather. She dipped back into Willow’s room for another puff of the vape. They won’t mind.
The mail came, dropped off by the carrier through a slot near the front door that Jen thought was quaint. She went to sift through the pile of letters as a distraction. Letter for Drew, junk mail, bill for Willow, catalog for Willow, junk mail for Joseph. She blinked at that one. It was some postcard advertising a rock and mineral show he had attended five years ago, not worth the effort to correct but now a regular annoyance she received every year. She threw the postcard in the trash, and left her housemates’ mail on the communal dining table. A fly landed on the pile, rubbing its forelegs together. Jen went to smush it but missed before it escaped.
There was one place in the house Jen hadn’t checked yet. Like all hundred year old homes in Portland, Jen’s house had an unfinished basement, with standard issue contents: an ancient washer and dryer, forgotten luggage from housemates’ past, broken musical instruments, a busted couch, and a dusty Saint Andrew’s cross left by some past kinky resident. It was almost comedic in its cartoonishness, the way a set of rickety narrow stairs with minimal head clearance led to a single bulb hanging in the middle of the room. Definitely a murder basement. Jen hated going down there, it creeped her out and made her think a little too hard about the tenuousness of her housing.
Her landlord was a white gay man in his fifties named Darryl who liked to think of himself as handy, but usually ended up prolonging repairs any time a plumbing or electrical issue came up. Jen thought about how much of a fight it was to get him to change her name on the lease, a slow motion text conversation that dragged on for weeks. For someone who prided himself in being active in the LGBTQ+ organizations in town, Darryl sure seemed to struggle to not write “Hi Joseph,” on emails regarding repairs in Jen’s room. But Sellwood was a good neighborhood, close in with food options and a grocery store within walking distance. Jen couldn’t complain about the rent and amenities. If Darryl couldn’t do something about these flies though after Jen had given it her best shot, they might have a problem.
Watching her head as she descended the staircase, Jen reached for the light cord and found it, revealing a much greater number of flies on the basement walls as the bulb kicked on. Gross! thought Jen. Whatever attracted them has to be down here. Jen prayed it wasn’t a sewage leak, but she could smell something incredibly off-putting. After a short search she discovered a crawlspace behind the dusty cross, and from there a form wrapped in plastic. She touched it, and a cloud of flies erupted out, landing on her and the walls and skittering in a frenzy. She shouted, and startled herself with the huskiness of her own voice. Shaking the flies off of herself, Jen panicked for a good minute until she was able to catch her breath.
Once Jen found some composure, she remembered - slowly - that this was where she had stashed Joseph’s corpse that first night they were together. This was a murder basement, after all. It had been so long since she had seen Joseph in the flesh. Photos of him were unavoidable, his name was everywhere, but it had been over two years since they had stood face to face. Now, after dragging his corpse out into the main room of the basement and peeling back the outer layer of sheeting, she found herself surprised by how frail he appeared to be. Decomposition had set in, though unevenly - she was unsure why parts of him still seemed to be moist.
Jen heard a horrible crackling sound as Joseph’s head suddenly lolled to face her. “Jen.” he said, disgorging more flies and maggots. Joseph’s voice sounded like a rustle of dry leaves. His mouth had receded into a rictus howl, “You made it.”
“What the Fuck.” said Jen. “Fuckfuckfuck-“
Joseph interrupted. “My friends found you. I need to talk to you.”
Jen frowned, and backed away a bit. “You’re dead, man. I killed you a long time ago. What the fuck more do you want?!”
“We have a score to settle. You think everything’s so cut and dry.” Joseph moved in a way that looked like he rolled his eyes, though his sockets were empty. “But it’s not.” Joseph seemed to gather himself. “You thought you took my place. Good for you. But you didn’t take everything. You left some things with me.”
Jen felt guarded, and tried to play it off cool. She feigned a laugh. “What did I leave other than that stupid fucking hoodie you’re wearing?” It was a stupid fucking hoodie, with a picture of an internet meme from 2008 on it.
“You left my problems with me, Jen. Bad habits. Traumas. Dare I say, ‘insecure attachment styles.’” The corpse wheezed in a strange way, perhaps a laugh? “You didn’t kill them when you killed me, instead you just left them down here. You may think that you’ve escaped me by looking different, sounding different, going by a new name - but when you replaced me, those problems remained inside me, and fed off of me and bred. And now everything is starting to hatch.”
“This is such fucking bullshit,” said Jen. “I don’t need to listen to lectures on emotional intelligence from a corpse. And what did you know about any of that in life, anyway? So FUCK YOU. I don’t NEED your problems. I have plenty of my own problems to deal with. Leaving the house and getting stared at, arguing with doctors, having to deal with pricks like the landlord who still think I’m you, or worse, think I’m some kind of pervert, YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE. And it’s LONELY. It’s hard to trust - anyone.” Jen’s anger gained a tinge of grief. “You know I had to go no contact with Mom, right? Can you even imagine what that was like for me?”
“Boo fucking hoo,” croaked the now obviously grinning corpse. “You split my head open and dumped me down here. I have no sympathy for you. I give you my FULL inheritance, flies and all.” Joseph’s head suddenly dropped and was still. A group of flies spilled out of his broken skull and dashed in all directions across the basement floor before flitting away.
The humming in the room grew louder. Fuck this, I’m out, thought Jen. She made for the stairs, only to smack her head against the low ceiling in the stairway. Storming into her room and grabbing her backpack, Jen threw some clothes and her laptop inside. I can go crash at Steph’s house tonight, she thought. Work on another place to live tomorrow. I can’t stay somewhere with that many fucking flies. Before heading out the door, she grabbed Willow’s vape. What the hell, no one will be the wiser.
Stepping into the humid summer night, Jen called an Uber and waited on the curb. Joseph was Darryl’s problem now. They always got along better, anyway.
It was then that Jen heard a faint buzzing coming from inside of her chest.