Behemoths

Once upon a time, plastic threatened to drown our world. To swallow it, and perhaps never spit us out again. Or perhaps, more accurate to say, we almost drowned ourselves in the stuff. We could've stopped any time. But we chose not to.

Some clever clogs had a solution.

There's a type of moth who, while he is still a caterpillar, can eat and digest plastic. So just breed these guys and put them to work at landfills. Right?

This seemed to be working well at first, but there was a snag.

Now that we apparently had a solution to the problem, why reduce the amount of plastic we were producing? It didn't matter anymore!

The caterpillars eventually turned into moths, which was completely fine and expected. The moths made more caterpillars, and, since human beings hadn't really stifled plastic production at all, hardly a dent had been made in the problem.

Some say the caterpillars simply evolved, but given the speed it happened, others think that's codswallop. They believe there was a government conspiracy involving genetic engineering, and some subjects escaped.

What we need, the clever clogs decided, was not "less plastic", but "more, and bigger caterpillars".

Picture it, the world a landfill site. People squeezed into precarious pockets. Waste overflowing and encroaching everywhere. The stench! The misery for the people who remembered better, cleaner, greener, times.... Maybe worse: the normalcy of it, for children who grew up in such horror.

Now imagine absolutely fucking enormous caterpillars, the size of buses, scooching along as these kinds of bugs do, and munching away on our wasted waste. Getting fatter and more huge on our unwanted and thoughtless mountains of absolute crap.

Each one of those behemoths has spun a cocoon around itself. The absurd turd-like things are littered around.

What's going to happen when the creatures emerge?

People tried destroying them, but they're surprisingly resilient.

The sheer size of the bugs that are about to overrun us gives me the heebiest of jeebies. We all keep one eye on them, waiting for the first sign that they are about to complete their metamorphosis.

The world holds her breath, and has a flame thrower handy.

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Word count: (excluding note): 366

Submitted on: 24th April at 23:23

*Quick Author's Note*

First, and most importantly: thank you for reading!

A Year of Stories: I'm writing a story every day this year. This one makes an 116 day streak since the 1st January. I can't believe I've come this far! I'm collating them all here.

Prompts: If you'd like to have a go at my unofficial April Challenge (Fucked Up Fairytales) I've linked it at the bottom. there's just seven days left of it!

If you'd like some more prompts to get your creative juices flowing, I've linked to a list of prompts for April.

Thank you

Thank you again! Especially if you are one of the people who has been staunchly reading these daily scribbles since the start of the year. I see you, and appreciate you 😁

I do my best to reciprocate as many reads as possible. If you leave me a comment, that makes it much easier. I'm behind at the moment, but I will catch up!