Fire burned in him. He had never done anything to hurt his wife. It wasn’t his fault she’d gone; he’d begged her not to leave him. It wasn’t his fault that he could not bring himself to talk about it, could not face the onslaught of his neighbors, raking over the memories of his marriage, sticking their noses in. It wasn’t his fault that because the gossips hadn’t seen her for a few months, conveniently forgetting she’d been housebound and rarely went out, and because he was a closed and private man, they’d drawn their own conclusions, laced with a cruelty born of ignorance.

It wasn’t his fault that in the end he’d been forced to lie, to pretend she was staying with her goddaughter to satisfy the busybodies who might feel inclined to voice their suspicions to the police.

The sensible course of action would be to ignore the envelope and dump it in the bin. But a part of him was wounded by these accusations. It fed his masochistic need to pick at the scab of this injustice.

The envelope was as light as a feather.

He shook it, but could feel nothing inside, no shift of weight, no displacement of contents. He frowned. Perhaps it was a note. Well, damn them all. He could handle that. He ran a finger along the seal and peeled back the flap.

In that split second, when he first looked inside, he believed it full of grains of rice. And that puzzled him, because why would those shit-for-brains kids send him rice? There were hundreds and hundreds of pale brownish grains, filling the envelope right to the brim, and when he looked again they were moving. They were moving.

Maggots.

He gagged. Dropped the envelope. And then they were everywhere, squirming across the carpet and moving over his slippers in their seemingly directionless quest for dying flesh.

Retching, Trefor lunged for the envelope while trying to sweep up a handful of the tiny, wriggling larvae, but he fumbled with it and lost his grip, tipping it over on its side. Now there were many more of them, spilling out of the Bubble Wrap, corkscrewing across one another, burrowing into the polyester fibers, seeking out dark places. Disappearing.

Sweet Jesus, those fucking kids. Did they have any idea what they had done?

Trefor kicked his feet, his movements wild and uncontrolled, trying to dislodge the maggots. He ran to the cupboard underneath the stairs and pulled out a vacuum cleaner, ancient and bulky. Hands shaking, he plugged it in and shoved it across the floor, hitting the baseboards and the radiator pipes in his panic to contain the infestation defiling his home. He needed them gone. Every last one.

But it was impossible to be certain.