12:30 AM Discovery
A boy, any boy. Could even be a man. He comes home from the coffee shop buzzed on his bean juice and needing to kill some time while sleep catches up to him. Okay, read a book. Plopped down in chair, pulling from a water bottle, plucking peanuts from a 5lb sack. Working on the book, some novel of space travel, but making more progress on the nuts. Focused as best as possible on the text, one hand maintains the book while the other cracks shells and dumps content into the mouth, and empties to a lap placed bowl.
Perhaps it is a break in the story, or maybe a notice of something else, but the eyes leave the book to survey the most recent shell. Occupied by the customary two nuts, the shell is also home to one, two, nope… three maggots. Wow, is there a prize for such a discovery? Likely not. More probable is an instantaneous curiosity toward a bowl of empty shells. Only a few pages into the book, but a couple of handfuls into the bag, are these the first maggots? Please be the first maggots. The sack goes in the garbage and queries go in the head.
And as all good stories need a moral… Be weary of midnight snacking.