Each October, Mrs. Bennett’s Creative Writing Club sponsors a spooky writing contest. The first place winner for 2025 is senior Iris Popham. Here is her story: Decaydence.
I fall past the ground, sinking further and further from the sun into the dirt. The soft yet gritty texture cascades around my skin, or maybe I cascade through it. Perhaps we’re cascading together, the dirt covering the sky above me as I push it to the sides and upwards, not of my own will but of gravity’s.
Finally, I come to a stop, the dirt filling in the gaps where my limbs spread out, packing in so tightly I can scarcely move. I feel hundreds of tiny legs on me, skittering and sharp, accompanied by the slimy squirm of grubs. Outside of me on my skin, but inside me too, an awful feeling; gassy but worse, like a stomach wanting to collapse but being forcibly held up and wriggled around. I open my mouth to groan, but dirt coats my teeth and tongue as the detritivores make their way inside, eager to make me one with the Earth, one with them.
Their circular mouths and mandibles drill into me, piercing my cold skin and the layers of soft tissue and muscle as the soil muffles my screams, the beetles rending the flesh from my bones with their strong jaws. I’m moldering, leaking, half-picked apart, but it’s not long before my eyes are too devoured to see my banquet of a body, only able to feel the slightest shiftings of the dirt fertilized by my decomposition and the squirming of the bugs come to feast.
I don’t know how long this goes on for; there is no sleep, no sun, no way to tell the time, only changes in the temperature of dirt that I’ve long lost the nerves to be privy to. Maybe it was only a few weeks, perhaps several years, maybe everything above is long gone and I’m the only sentient being left. A sentient corpse, what a load of good that does me. I’m hardly even a corpse anymore, though, just a pile of bones held together by the few remaining scraps of tissue and tendon that haven’t crumbled under the weight of time.
What happens when my bones turn to dust? My consciousness didn’t cease when my brains leaked out, when my heart and liver were eaten. Am I simply stored in the marrow? Or is there truly a soul, a soul stuck in this undignified tomb until every last speck of me becomes something else and I’m allowed to move on? Is this my first round of Hell, or is that where I will go after all this is over? Am I in limbo, sentenced to repent for sins I may not even remember?
No. No, I can see, I can see through the thousands upon millions upon trillions of tiny eyeballs, I can see the sky and taste the dirt and blood and excrement, feel the wind whip past the bristles on all our legs, lifting our tiny wings as we live the shortest lives and repeat the cycles over and over, never going to waste because we are simply not allowed. I am dust and I am not, I am exoskeleton and haemolymph and flesh and blood, rising through the sky and falling into the ground, hatching from eggs to eat and be eaten until the end.
