I am so tired. Tired of everything; of this world, of this life, of myself. Is it too much to ask to lie down in the soft moss and let the maggots in my gut wiggle and squirm and love me the way I could never love another. Need me and love me and use me as a soft place to crawl and move and live. I want to feel myself fade away as I watch their small shiny faces greet me. But I fear the world wants to lock me in a concrete box and bury me underground where the worms cannot reach. If I am sealed away, who will feed the maggots?

maggots 😬😬

PERCEPTION: A strange shape in your peripheral vision catches your attention. The early sunset makes it difficult to make out from a distance but closing the distance by a few steps makes it clear. The mangled, decomposing corpse of a long dead fox. Almost all fur has shed from the corpse, several limbs are seemingly missing, and there is a gaping cavity where its internal organs should be. The stench is beyond comprehension.

VOLITION: Why are you looking at this? What about this is interesting to you? Yes, yes, you’re thinking something that you feel is dramatic and deep but be real. It’s just a rotting fox corpse, teeming with maggots.

DRAMA: Another day, another dead body. Just like old times.

INLAND EMPIRE: The maggots there. They call to you. The children of the rot want to be one with you, as well. Bake them into cookies if you must but do not ignore this opportunity.

DIY MED: Maggot Debridement Therapy

Did I mention that I’m in medical college and plan on sharing some forbidden knowledge here that I learn from it? Well, if I didn’t, now you know exactly what I’m doing. I thought that since today is the Awakening of Insects, this would be a perfect opportunity to talk about maggot debridement therapy. MDT was used since the 1920s, when military surgeons first observed maggots to be beneficial when injured soldiers who remained on the battlefield were found to heal quicker if flies were allowed to lay eggs in their wounds, and by 1928, medical-grade maggots were cultivated and made germ-free before their use in treatments. Today, under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, commercial medicinal maggots are an FDA-approved therapeutic medical device used to heal and clean wounds that are not healing normally, are infected, or are necrotic, and also are often used for patients who are not good candidates for surgery or have not responded positively to other types of intervention.

For many, the thought is a visceral horror: the very creatures that pulse within the shrouded cavities of the grave deliberately placed upon the flesh of those who are living and those who are half-dead. It taps into a deep-seated thanatophobia, a shuddering association where the line between patient and corpse blurs. They are undeniably grotesque — creepy, crawly, dripping with a viscous, cadaver-slick sheen. But this very slime is a healing balm wrested from the charnel house. Like the surgeon’s leech, they are medical devices that feed. As they are deposited onto the wound bed, they sink their mouth-hooks in and excrete a salivary enzyme that methodically liquefies tissue, turning it into a ghastly, absorbable broth. They are not just cleaning the wound — they are performing a macabre, microscopic consumption — and through this, the infection is siphoned away, encapsulated within their translucent bodies. When they are removed, sated and swollen with the evidence of decay, what remains is a patient’s healed wound, startlingly pristine.

There are still a few risks in performing this. The most frequent are a throbbing, crawling pain at the application site and a fierce, weeping irritation of the skin — as if the flesh itself is protesting this unholy symbiosis. Yet, even those pale in comparison to a more profound and alarming cutaneous rebellion. Extreme caution must be exercised when the wound exposes loops of the fragile walls of major blood vessels, especially if these structures are themselves marred by necrotic tissue. Here, the maggot’s indiscriminate secretions become hazardous, which leads to a catastrophic result: a sudden, torrential hemorrhage or the slow leakage of contents through a newly-formed fistula. Thus, this alliance with the cleaners of the dead must be entered with solemn respect for its inherent duality. Perform at your own risk. For in the final reckoning, the practitioner must be held accountable for the actions of tiny, tireless, and utterly amoral allies, and must be prepared to face the consequences of a power that, once unleashed, is not easily controlled.

Participants:

• Any, you can either do this to yourself or to someone you’d like to heal

Materials:

• Gauze, one should be short and dampened with saline, and the other should be long and dry
• Maggots, specifically the medical kind that Monarch Labs sell
• Analgesic, preferably lidocaine
• Spatula, small
• Alcohol swab
• Zinc oxide
• Saline

Directions:

1. Prepare the Ground. Before the necromantic agents of debridement can be introduced to their feast, the field of operation must be made ready. This begins with the cleansing of the wound itself. Using an alcohol swab — or, in a more formal clinical setting, a sterile saline solution followed by a gentle alcohol wipe at the very margins — one must carefully clean the wound bed. The purpose here is not to sterilize but to clear away any loose surface debris that might impede the maggots’ immediate work, preparing the raw canvas. Apply with a light touch, primarily to the firmer tissues at the edge, lest it causes undue suffering to the patient, and then anoint the surrounding healthy tissue — the integument that borders the wound — with a thick, impassable barrier of zinc oxide paste that encircles the entire wound. Neglect this step, and the procedure will be marked by dire consequences of Biblical proportions upon the fragile frame.
2. Introduce the Lucilia. The act of solemnly distrubuting these hungry critters from their sterile vial to the waiting wound bed is the consecration of the host. Now, remember: ten larvae per square centimeter. This is not an arbitrary number. Too few, and the debridement will be slow, inefficient, and allow for the continued proliferation of bacteria within the untouched necrotic tissue. Too many, and one risks an overpopulation that could lead to a greater volume of enzymatic secretions that might overwhelm the protective barrier and a higher probability of escape, testing the defenses of the zinc oxide rampart. Perhaps use a spatula to carefully and evenly transfer them across the wound’s entire topography. One must ensure that the deep pockets and the raised islands of tissue all receive their fair share of the colony — you cannot simply pour them on and hope for the best, each larva must be placed with the intention that it finds its purpose.
3. Seal the Tomb. Once the Lucilia are in place, the wound must be sealed. This containment serves multiple purposes: it keeps them confined to their task, it maintains a level of moisture essential for their survival and activity, and it absorbs the exudate that will be produced. First, place a piece of sterile gauze, dampened with saline or water, over the maggots. Then, over this layer, place a second gauze, but this time dry and serving as the primary absorbent, wicking away the fluids that will inevitably seep from the wound. Finally, secure the entire dressing firmly, but not tightly, with surgical tape — ensure that it is enough to prevent escape but not so tight as to restrict circulation or compress the wound bed. The patient is now, in a very real sense, hosting a small, contained ecosystem dedicated to the purification of their own flesh. At this point, you may let the patient adjust to their physical sensations by closing their eyes and feeling. Trust me, they’ll need to.
4. Exercise Patience. The dressing is to be left in place for a period of two to three days — this is not a matter of convenience but of biological necessity — because it takes time for Lucilia to complete their work. Within the first 24 hours, they are primarily acclimating and beginning the process of enzymatic breakdown. By the 48-hour mark, their activity is at its peak, and the wound bed will be visibly changing. By 72 hours, they will have grown considerably — sometimes doubling or tripling in size — and will begin to saturate the wound environment with their waste products (primarily ammonium urate, which also contributes to an alkaline environment hostile to bacteria). The decision to remove the dressing at this point is based on a combination of time and observation. Some practitioners prefer the two-day cycle, while others may extend to three. Upon removal, the maggots can be gently rinsed from the wound with a stream of sterile saline.

Additional Notes:

What will be revealed beneath is often remarkable: a clean, healthy bed of granulation tissue, pink and viable, where once laid a landscape of discolored necrosis. However, the practitioner must be prepared for the possibility that the task may not yet be complete. Depending upon the initial depth and severity of the wound, a single application may be insufficient. Deep wounds with undermining tunnels, or those heavily colonized with resistant biofilms, may require multiple applications. One must re-assess the wound after the removal of the first colony. If pockets of necrotic tissue remain, the entire rite — from the cleansing and the reinforcement of the zinc oxide barrier to the introduction of a fresh and hungry generation of larvae — must be performed anew. This cycle may be repeated several times until the wound is judged to be ready for the next stage of closure, whether by secondary intention, skin graft, flap, and so on and so forth.

Let it be known that there exist territories of the human body where Lucilia is not merely inadvisable but constitutes an act of unforgivable medical recklessness. They should not, under any circumstances, be applied to blood vessels or wounds that have a tendency to bleed easily, and/or introduced into wounds that communicate with a body cavity or internal organ. The practitioner, in applying to such a wound, is essentially placing a time bomb upon the patient’s body. One moment, the wound may appear to be debriding nicely. The next, the dressing will be saturated with a relentless gush of hemoglobin. The maggots will be washed away in a crimson flood, their work undone in an instant as the patient’s vessel pours out onto the bed. No tourniquet, no manual pressure, no emergency surgery, nothing at all may be able to save their bodily existence, and the manmade law will be coming to arrest your sorry ass (and we don’t want that).

The final warning is of a different character but no less necessary. It is a warning against using any Lucilia that aren’t from labs. Their bodies and guts are teeming with the very bacteria one is trying to eliminate from a wound — Clostridium, Bacteroides, coliforms, etc. To apply such creatures is to plant a garden of pathogens directly into the patient’s flesh. The result will be a fulminant, gas-forming, tissue-destroying infection that will spread with an instantaneous speed. The patient will not be healed, they will instead be consumed by a sepsis born of the very therapy meant to save them. Thus, these are the boundaries drawn in the suffering of those who came before. The wise practitioner will memorize these precautions and will hold them as sacred. For in knowing when not to perform this, one demonstrates a mastery far greater than in its mere execution. The power to heal is also the power to refrain. Let these be your guide.

Murgoots

Murgoots 2

Murgoots

Many people are like maggots

They eat shit and squirm squirm about how the shit they eat is good actually

When 2 maggots start arguing about which shit is better, horseshit or cowshit. Thats when the squirming gers to a new level of squirm

i hope pete sees this and knows im gonna beat him up

maggots here

I hope that the person who sends hospital bills to collections quits their job or goes to hell. I can’t pay you AND I have cancer what the fuck.

Maggots animate it, roiling the limbs and face and belly.

“Deeper” - Jeff Long

this is what you will see when you cut me open

maggots

You may think a good way to transport 100 maggots is to put them in your mouth.
However I have it on good authority now that it’s a very bad idea, they taste bad and it is harder to get 100 maggots out of your mouth than it is to put them in.

The idea I’ve been kicking around in my head for the past two weeks, text copied below for better readability!

Fidesluxet | Sparkfall

The Basics:

600 years ago, several gods fell out of the sky. Now the mortal races look for their sparks to grow their own ingenuity or claim a reward from the remaining pantheon by returning them to their place among the stars.

The Characters:

Ateus is a fallen god in a mortal body. He believes in decay and the life that comes from rot, and has little knowledge of how the world has changed since his fall and imprisonment.

Cole Hamlyn is a mortal man. He believes that no one stays good and true for long, and seeks means so that he can ensure he is someone people will hesitate to betray in the future.

Creepy Crawlies hair clips

ALT

𝘚𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘮
𝘊𝘭𝘪𝘱 𝘚𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘰 𝘗𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘵 - 2026

𝕯𝖊𝖙𝖆𝖎𝖑𝖘 𝖀𝖓𝖉𝖊𝖗 𝕮𝖚𝖙

“Swarm” is a portrait of Whisper depicting a reflection of myself, and how creating personal pieces feels vulnerable. Only a fraction of the thought process that leads to the creation of the piece comes to light, and what remains in the dark is a swarm of buzzing intensity.

Depicted is Whisper holding a toy maggot to its chest as it is looking behind itself in a friable expression. Only slivers of light cut diagonally through the portrait, highlighting the focal points of the pose. Remaining in the shadows of the piece is the rest of Whisper, along with the background of spiked circular motion coming from the head with swarms of fly silhouettes.