Marvin and the Moths

by Jonathan Follett

  “I was trying to save you!” Fatima said, wiping vainly at her blue cheeks.

  “Really? Even after I hung you out to dry?”

  “Yes, really!” Fatima said. “And after walking around with you and your soggy suit for an hour, I needed some drying time!”

  “Look!” Lee shouted, pointing. The spider had tipped off the edge of the beam and was plummeting earthward—directly above Aristotle, who hadn’t yet stopped dancing.

  With a crash and a cry and a puff of smoke, the spider landed atop the moth.

  The monster was still alive. And angrier than ever.

  “You burnt my hair!” the spider growled, his face inches from Aristotle’s startled compound eyes. “I’m going to shred you like pulled pork, and eat your guts with a plastic fork!”

  “Th-th-that doesn’t sound very d-dignified,” Aristotle stammered.

  “It was a rhyming couplet, you dolt!” the spider screamed. “Look it up!”

  “Aristotle!” Ahab, said, and charged to his rescue. “Come on, everybody!”

  Lee, his face flushed with anger, charged toward his former captor with a shout.

  “I’ve got a new battle cry,” Abraham said to Marvin. “Let me know if you like it.” He ran to join the fight, screaming, “I regret meeting each and every one of you!”

  “I learned so little this year,” Marvin said, “and now we’re all going to die.” He turned to Fatima. “Well, thanks for trying to save me earlier. Thanks for—for being my friend, I guess. And for being my first—and last—real date.”

  Fatima furrowed her brow, grabbed him by the head, and kissed him forcefully on the lips before running off to help the others.

  Marvin stood frozen in place, utterly shocked. He didn’t know whether his life was flashing before his eyes because he was about to die or what, but everything went quiet, and the events of the past few weeks began to uncoil in his memory. He had experienced what was arguably the worst first day of school anyone had ever had. He had occasionally mistreated those few individuals who had seen beyond his failings. Yet now, he found himself with friends. Real friends—friends he was willing to fight for. He stared blankly ahead like that for long moments, not moving, until the sounds of battle worked their way into his brain.

  “Hey, Romeo!” Abraham shouted. “We could use a little help here!”

  He looked up to see that, despite the onslaught of legs, wings, and fists, the fight was not going well for his side. Amid the flames and smoke, the spider struggled with Lee, who had leaped onto the monster’s back and was beating on his massive head. Just as Ahab jumped up and flapped his wings to begin an aerial assault, the spider grabbed Lee and hurled him toward the giant moth. Ahab took the impact on his right wing, and it was torn to tatters, plunging both combatants to the ground with painful thuds.

  Aristotle, meanwhile, had pulled himself free of the spider, but instead of fleeing or fighting hand-to-hand, he was busy trying to reload his siege engine. “I just need to recalibrate for a low-elevation target!” he said. Aristotle grabbed nearby scraps of Pork Loaf to refill the colander, then ignited them. But just as he moved the weapon into position, the spider broke loose and charged straight at him.

  “Wait!” Aristotle cried. “I can’t hit you if you’re that close!” He backpedaled furiously, trying to get enough distance to launch his flaming payload—but in the process, he tripped and overturned the catapult on his head. The spider stopped and eyed Aristotle curiously as the moth struggled and yelped beneath the burning wreckage of his own machine.

  “Oh no!” Fatima said. She ran to the wall and grabbed a fire extinguisher to put out the oily flames that now danced across the tall moth’s hairy body. She sprayed white foam across him and the now-useless siege engine.

  At this, the spider chuckled a little and performed the arachnid equivalent of a shrug. He turned back to see what was left of the rest of his foes—just in time to find himself face-to-face with Abraham.

  “Time to call in the designated hitter!” Abraham bellowed, and, with a tight four-handed grip on his bat, swung with all his might. The bat connected with one of the spider’s knees, and the spider shrieked in pain and fell to the floor. Abraham followed up with swing after swing to the beast’s bloated abdomen. “You low-down insect wannabe!” Abraham said as he hammered away. “Grow a thorax!”

  “Enough!” the spider grunted out between blows. “You irritate me with your blathering, so now I take your eye!”

  “That doesn’t make any sense!” Abraham protested.

  “Here!” the spider said, and one of his limbs flashed out, striking at Abraham’s left compound eye. The moth staggered backward, clutching his head.

  The spider drew himself back up to his full height, upon which he heard a shout from behind. He turned and saw Fatima, her blue face glowering at the monster as she tightened her grip on the heavy fire extinguisher. “You are an unplanned-for contingency,” she said, “and I HATE unplanned-for contingencies!” She spun around, swinging the metal canister behind her, and hurled it at the spider like an athlete performing the hammer throw.

  The fire extinguisher sped past the spider, missing his head by inches and clattering uselessly to the floor. The spider hissed angrily at Fatima, who turned and ran.

  Within seconds, the monster was upon her, and with a vicious swipe of his foreleg, he smacked Fatima across the midsection, hurling her sideways, across the room and into the wall. She came down hard on her bad leg.

  “My knee!” she cried, huddling in a small heap on the floor.

  “An eye for an eye,” the spider said, gloating, as he glanced at Abraham, who had stumbled to the floor in pain, and then back to Fatima. “And a knee for a knee.” The spider advanced slowly through the clouds of smoke toward Fatima, closing in for the kill.

  Fatima’s cries snapped Marvin out of his daze. As was his style, Marvin rushed forward without thinking, running to put himself between Fatima and the spider. On the way, he scooped up the only weapon he could find—the broken arm of the Mr. Piggly Winks statue. He skidded to a stop just in front of Fatima, and, wielding the Pork Loaf arm like some comic version of a hero’s sword, took a swift swing at the head of the spider. The monster ducked the blow easily and stared at Marvin with surprise and amusement.

  “You again!” the spider said. “We have some unfinished business, you soggy nuisance.”

  Despite the knee-shaking terror he felt, Marvin’s innate sense of rudeness rallied, and he found himself talking back. “At least I’ll dry off. I don’t see your eye growing back anytime soon.” Marvin thrust at the spider with the Pork Loaf arm. “Now scuttle out of here. Go back to whatever hole you crawled out of.”

  The spider chuckled. “Whatever hole I crawled out of?” he said. “You should know that place very well. It is the same dark pit of despair where you make your bed each night!”

  “Shove it, you half-blind, smoldering hairball!” Marvin said, and swung ferociously at the spider’s head. The spider grabbed the Pork Loaf arm out of Marvin’s hands before the blow could connect, and casually tossed it away, far from Marvin’s reach. Marvin swallowed nervously and took a step backward toward Fatima.

  The spider laughed as he stepped forward. “You fool,” he said, swinging his head from side to side, his eyes glittering in the flames that danced in patches across the gym floor. “Everything that has happened is your fault! All the pain and misery this town has endured. The broken bodies of your friends. And I, Caliban, who stand here to seal your doom. I owe my very existence to you—you and your faulty science! For it was your elixir that freed my great intellect to rule over you lesser creatures.”

  “How’s that going for you?” Marvin asked, stepping backward. “Last I checked, you had been set on fire, lost an eye, and got your leg broke.”

  “Mock me all you want,” the spider said. “It is but sound and fury, signifying nothing. Nothing can save you now.” The spider edged forward and readied his fangs.

  Bu
t he paused. He heard the clearing of a throat and looked back to see Lee holding the discarded Pork Loaf arm in one hand and smacking it against the palm of the other, like a billy club at the ready. “You miscalculated,” Lee said.

  “How’s that?” the spider said.

  “According to me and my friends’ science experiment, six ounces of Pork Loaf, introduced to my digestive system, can generate enough force to take out an entire classroom,” Lee said. He stared at Mr. Piggly Winks’s arm as he hefted it. “How many ounces do you think this is?”

  “Enough stalling, my little amuse-bouche,” the spider said. “I tire of these games. I think the time has come for eating.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Lee said.

  Marvin, realization slowly dawning, waved his hands in protest. “Lee, no—!”

  Lee smiled and winked at Marvin.

  Then he shoved the Pork Loaf arm into his mouth and began chomping.

  Since the dawning of the world, there have only been seven stenches so foul they left a mark on the very fabric of time and space. The first was the reek that rose from the primordial ooze, that stinking slop that covered the earth for millions of years and eventually belched forth upon the planet the first primitive forms of life. The second wave swept across the earth’s surface sixty-five million years ago, when the bodies of countless dinosaurs rotted under the dark, ash-covered skies following a devastating meteor impact. It wasn’t until 218 BC that one of the Great Odors was first experienced by human nostrils: The smell of Hannibal’s forty-six thousand unwashed troops as they marched through the Alps behind a column of massive war elephants. The fourth smell was created by a Trappist monk who took a vow to set aside his cheese and refrain from eating it until he had finished transcribing his latest copy of the Bible; two years later, he retrieved the cheese from the monastery’s cellar, unearthing the stinking forerunner of what would become Limburger. Years later, in Paris, the stink arising from the practice of throwing rubbish and waste directly into the streets was magnified tenfold on a particularly hot and windless summer afternoon to generate a smell so terrible, it drove the city’s residents to madness and may have helped spark the French Revolution. In 1909, the sixth of the infamous odors led the organizers of the Boston Marathon to discontinue the celebratory tradition of tossing used gym socks into the Charles River after the race; the difficult river cleanup goes on to this day.

  But nothing in the realm of human experience could prepare someone for the seventh smell. It shook heaven and earth, and seemed to bend the very air around Lee as it built up to full potency. Marvin knew it smelled bad, but it smelled so bad that he could no longer even call it a smell. It was an odor that was more felt than smelt, like a linebacker standing on your face. He also heard a hum, which started out so low he couldn’t quite tell if it was there. Gradually, it increased in pitch, until it was reminiscent of the otherworldly chanting of throat-singing Buddhist monks.

  When the sound grew high-pitched enough to become uncomfortable, Marvin saw objects begin to rise into the air.

  First, plastic cups and paper plates lifted off from the tabletops and chairs where they had been set down. Then the chairs themselves began slowly skidding across the gym floor, their legs occasionally coming up off the ground before bouncing back down and skidding onward. Marvin felt himself being pulled sideways, and realized that everything in the room had begun churning in a clockwise circle, with Lee at its center. He, Fatima, the moths, and all the debris from the dance were being pulled across the floor or floated through the air in a sort of slow-motion cyclone.

  “This is impossible!” screamed Aristotle over the keening sound. “The laws of physics do not allow for—”

  “Can it!” shouted Abraham as he was swept along the floor beside Aristotle and the wreckage of his siege engine. “What do you know, bigmouth? You just got creamed by your own catapult!”

  “Look out!” cried Ahab as he lost his grip on the floor and was hurled through the air and into the other two moths, his damaged wing flapping vainly against the unseen force. Ahab’s giant, rotund body bowled over his compatriots and sent them all tumbling out the doors of the cafetorium and into the hallway.

  The spider was scrabbling at the ground with his many limbs, desperately seeking purchase near the eye of the storm.

  Marvin looked around for Fatima. She was swinging past a bit farther out from Lee, her feet barely touching the floor, her eyes wide with terror. “Give me your hand!” he said, and reached out for her. She groped frantically for his arm, missing several times before their fingertips touched and he pulled her in.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Marvin said. “Do you have a page in your Harvest Dance binder for this?”

  Fatima frowned at him. “Well, the tornado shelter is supposed to be the cafetorium!” she said. “I don’t really know what you do when there’s a tornado in the cafetorium!”

  Fatima opened her mouth to say something else, but just then the force of the maelstrom spun them off into a corner of the room, wedging them against the wall and knocking the breath from their lungs. A long metal table followed soon after, turning over onto its edge and slamming against the walls on either side of them. It became wedged in place, trapping them in a small, triangular pocket of safety. They heard clang after clang as folding chairs piled up against the table like storm-tossed debris. When they recovered their senses, Marvin and Fatima clawed their way up and looked over the edge of the barricade.

  In the center of the room, Lee stood motionless, his arms slack at his side. He had dropped the stub end of the Pork Loaf limb he had been eating, and his eyes were half-closed. Just in front of him, the giant spider continued to claw frantically at the ground, seeming almost to run in place as he fought the vortex. At last, Marvin saw the spider’s hideous legs leave the ground, just as the noise reached an unbearably high, shrieking crescendo. The outline of Lee’s body became indistinct, and Marvin realized that his friend was glowing brightly.

  “Don’t look at it!” Marvin shouted to Fatima, and they both ducked down behind the table.

  With a flash of blinding white light, the world went silent.

  The explosion was terrific. All the gym windows high overhead shattered outward. The flames that had licked the gym floor and walls were extinguished in an instant. Every remaining folding chair was flung hard against the walls in a perfect circle emanating outward from Lee. The metal table shielding Marvin and Fatima bent under the pressure but did not break.

  The spider’s body shot through the air and into the wall with tremendous force, leaving a disgusting green splat on the painted cinder blocks.

  At last, Lee collapsed to the floor and was motionless.

  Marvin and Fatima frantically dug their way out of the pile of chairs and tables. There was no sound as each crumpled folding chair clattered to the floor. They shouted to each other, but after the noise of the explosion, all they could hear was a high-pitched ringing. Marvin clambered over the mountain of metal and ran across the bare gym floor toward Lee’s motionless body. Lee’s suit had been cut to ribbons by the force of the explosion, and tiny wisps of smoke rose from the charred edges of fabric. His light-blond hair was scorched in places, and his skin was pale and waxy.

  Marvin couldn’t tell if Lee was still breathing.

  He bent over his friend and shook his body, shouting soundlessly into his ears.

  A feeling of cold dread began to creep over Marvin’s skin. At last, he realized it was not just fear, but actual cold—water was rushing past his ankles. He turned around and saw that the fire department had arrived, and they were blasting their hoses across the smoldering gym floor. Fatima was standing like a statue in a river, her blue dress rippling as the water flowed past her. The spider, amazingly enough, was gone. The flood was already washing away the trail of goo it had left behind when it fled out the doorway.

  Marvin’s concerns, however, were more immediate. As cold water surroun
ded him and soaked into his wrinkled wool pants, he silently mouthed, “Not again.”

  Lee opened his eyes and found himself standing. He was up to his knees in water, but unlike on the floor of the cafetorium, the water here was not cold. It was warm and soothing, and each gentle wave that washed past him seemed to take some of his cares away. He looked up and saw that he stood near the shore of a misty green island, and that figures waited for him on the sand. Some he could recognize, and some he could not, but they all seemed familiar, and they were all holding their noses.

  Two of the figures waded out into the surf, and Lee realized they were his mother and father.

  “Oh, Lee,” his mother said, a sad smile on her face. “It’s not time for you yet, honey. You need to go back.”

  “And quickly!” someone shouted from the shore.

  “Shut up!” Lee’s father said, turning back and glaring at the crowd. They all took a step back, shuffling their feet in the sand self-consciously.

  “But, Mom—Dad,” Lee said, his eyes filling with tears. “It’s been so long.”

  “I know, honey,” Lee’s mom said, and she bent over and gave him a quick, firm hug before stepping back. “But you still have a long way to go. Your friends need you right now.”

  Lee’s father placed a strong hand on his shoulder and gave a squeeze. “Remember who your real friends are,” he said. “We can see things in the world a bit differently from where we stand. We can see where you might end up. We don’t want you falling in with the wrong people.”

  Lee opened his mouth to respond, but couldn’t think of what to say. It was all too much, too fast. His mother smiled at him again, and his father spun him around firmly and pushed him out into the waves.

  Lee went under the surface, and it seemed to him as though he was instantly plummeting down a waterfall.

  Scenes from his life flashed past: running through the sprinkler on a hot summer day. Skinning his knee falling off a skateboard. Positioning green plastic army men for an epic battle on the living room rug. His mother shoving him up through the trapdoor of the tree fort and telling him to pull up the ladder behind him, and not make a sound. His father out on the lawn at night, shouting at people Lee couldn’t see from his hiding place in the tree fort. The long walk up to his grandmother’s house after his parents’ funeral, his suit itching him uncomfortably, the house looking strange and unwelcoming. Day after day in school, held at more than arm’s length by students and teachers alike. And lastly, those few short weeks spent with Marvin and Fatima, where he finally felt like he was being talked to and treated like a normal person.