Botfly Eyes

I remember once watching a video about a woman infested with maggots. Botfly larvae had scratched and wriggled their way into her upper arm and made themselves at home right under her skin. The bites were almost invisible at first, but the larvae kept growing and eating her flesh, and the spots on her skin soon became red and infected as she kept scratching, scratching, scratching. Finally, driven mad by the constant itching, the woman had gone to see a doctor. The charming little dermatologist had injected each of the bites with some sort of liquid and soon, pop! Pop, pop, pop! Maggots started bursting out of her skin and into the small stainless steel tray held by the doctor, pus disgorging from the cavities left in her flesh. By the end nearly two dozen greedy parasites lay squirming in the tray. The woman had fainted. The video ended with the doctor holding up one of the maggots to the camera, before crushing it between her fingers.

At the time I wondered what it would feel like, to have something writhing and feeding and itching just under my skin. Now, sitting in an aisle seat halfway through a five hour flight, I thought I knew.

It was the tall man behind me. I could feel two small spots on the back of my neck, just below my hairline, where his eyes were burrowing in. He was two rows back and his eyes had not left me for the entire flight, I was sure of it. It was driving me insane. More than anything I wanted to reach back and just start scratching at the spots, scratch-scratch-scratching until I dug his little larvae out of me.

But I didn't. I sat still and forced myself not to fidget. I kept my hands calmly on the armrests and endured. After everything that happened at the airport, I couldn't afford to draw any more attention to myself. And so I sat there and pretended I didn't know he was there, pretended I couldn't feel his eyes eating into my skin, pretended I couldn't even see him. Just like everyone else.

I shouldn't have brought the knife. I had told myself that even as I was packing it carefully into my bag. But it had been too tempting! The security check, the x-ray machine, getting pulled aside by the cop. "Sir, you can't bring this on a plane", he had said as he held the knife. The knife! And I had bleached it and cleaned it and bleached it again, but to stand there with a police officer, a fucking cop, holding the knife, and then to just shrug and say, "well ok, just chuck it I guess". Ha ha! Who could have resisted?

That's when I had first seen the man. Packing everything back into my small carry-on bag — everything except the knife, of course — I had looked up. And there across a crowded room he stood, silently, staring at me. He looked exactly as he had when I had first seen him that night in the city. He stood straight and strong, in a clean white shirt and dark blue jeans. Untouched, unblemished. Except for his eyes. His eyes were from when I had last seen him. Twisted and broken in the bushland, staring sightlessly into the scorching sun, unblinking as a fly crawled across his eyeball.

He wasn't really there of course, in that room at the airport. Just like he's not really there now, two rows behind me, gnawing into the back of my neck. I know he's not really there, I know that. I'm not crazy. But I wished he had just stayed where I had left him. Him and his damn botfly eyes.