The bug flew up to the building before him, not knowing if it was truly the best idea or not. Only a few feet away were hundreds of giants, each of whom could crush him in an instant. Then again, he was immortal, so that wasn’t all that threatening.

            The bigger issue was what to do. He had fun in the girl’s locker room, but he was no longer in the mood to hide and watch people strip. He recalled the events in the forest. Being stepped on by the deer, then being eaten by the bird. It was so gross. Being slowly digested, mixing with the countless other bugs the bird had eaten that day. Swimming in a bath of organs and acid.

            “Oh!” he said happily. “I could eat something!” It was the first time things around him had been calm enough for the bug to notice the low growling in his stomach. That pear had been tasty, but he hadn’t eaten much of it before he was so rudely interrupted.  

            The small fly roamed around for a bit, trying to find something appetizing, or at least something fun. Sadly nothing interesting seemed to pop up

He circled around the large, square room that he knew to be the lunch hall. All sorts of smells wafted up from the exhaust vents, some of which were actually pleasant. A rare accomplishment for the lunch staff.

Finding an entrance proved to be more of a challenge than he had hoped for. All of the windows had been closed due to the cold, as well as the doors.

The fly plopped down on a windowsill, looking into the lunchroom hopefully. The sheer ferocity with which the students attacked their lunches with was simply stunning. He watched as one boy attempted to shove an entire sloppy Joe sandwich into his mouth, spilling half of its contents on the plate below him. It was like watching a nature documentary about crocodiles that hadn’t eaten in months when a heard of gazelle try and cross the river, only the gazelle seemed to have a greater chance of survival than the lunches.

A low mumbling echoed from the fly’s gullet, reminding him just how hungry he was. How he wished he could just jump into a plate of pasta, or dive into a bowl of soup. Eat all he wanted, and never be forced to slurp up a discarded drop of syrup from off the ground.

   As he sat, fantasizing about a delicious lunch that seemed too far away to ever become reality, a buzzing entered his ears. He turned, trying to find the source of the sound.

“Oh great,” he said as he saw what was making the aggravating noise. Another fly, only bigger, fatter, uglier, and simply more repugnant, than any other fly Nick had seen in his life. It hummed through the air, its greasy wings slowly beating up and down, to lazy to put any real effort in.

As it came closer, a stench enveloped Nick. It was not the normal type of stench a wild animal would have, not even if it had been rolling around in its own feces. It was as if this fly had found a landfill, built a home there, absorbed the stench of thousands of years of waist, and then decided that it wasn’t enough. 

If a thousand whale carcasses suddenly appeared on the beach, each one decaying in the summer sun, it would not have compared to the reek of this fly. Imagine a public carnival during the summer. Now imagine the dirty public bathroom at that carnival, only it was never washed, ever, and had recently been visited by a group of burley bikers who had eaten two hundred dollars worth of Taco Bell. If you are able to imagine this site, and not pass out from sheer terror, than imagine the minimum wage employee who is then told to clean the mess up. If you could convert that man’s terror into stench, you might come close to that of this fly.

It landed on the windowsill next to Nick, stink lines practically radiating out from its thickness. It turned to the boy, its black eyes coated with a layer of slime. Disgustingly, it swaggered over to Nick, one thought in its mind.

“Hey baby,” it said in its best sexy voice. “You looking for a good time?”

If a fly had ever actually managed to display emotion on its face, it was nothing compared to the look of complete disgust that Nick now displayed.

“What?” he managed to ask after a good minute of trying to comprehend what was happening.

“I know I’m stunning,” the fly said in a deep voice as it flexed its muscles. “But you’re pretty cute to, so you wanna do something?”

What the hell was happening? Only a few seconds ago, Nick had been quietly fantasizing about food. Now it looked as if he would never eat again without fears of throwing up.

“You know,” the bug continued, still using its most seductive tone. “I know a great trash can with our names on it.” If a fly could wink, this one did.

“I think I’ll pass,” Nick finally managed to say. Evan as he did, he could feel the juices in his stomach fighting to jump from his mouth.

The other bug was stunned. Never in its whole life had it been turned down. Not even once. It had worked for hours and hours to become the most disgusting, repugnant being in the whole world. He should have been able to confidently lay any fly he so chose. What was happening? Was he not disgusting? Were his layers of slime not thick enough? Were his wings not greasy enough, or was it his body? He could always put on a few more ounces, but he didn’t think it would matter.

It stumbled off the ledge, to stunned to even speak, and flew back to its dumpster where it preceded to binge eat garbage, all in an attempt to regain its repulsiveness.

After the thing had left, Nick turned back to the lunchroom. His appetite had been diminished, but it returned with a new ferocity once he saw a student devoured a large slice of pizza as if it was nothing. Rich, red, gooey sauce dripping down onto his shirt, the smell almost coming through the window. He needed to get in there.

Gracefully he jumped from the windowsill, flying around the room, hoping to find some sort of opening that he had missed. On his third loop around, he noticed a dumpster packed to the top, and the slightest amount of movement. He buzzed in closer, only to find the giant fly from before, crying, and gorging on a discarded apple core.

Nick flew away as fast as his wings would let him.

Life seemed to loose some of its meaning by the seventh trip around. Being so close to such an oases of taste and smells, yet being trapped outside, doomed to never taste the sweet lunch food of public school. He pressed his face against a window, hoping that somehow he could transverse the glass, but nothing happened. Glass has a tendency to stay solid, no matter how much you would wish otherwise.

If you really wanted to, you could change one large sheet of glass into many much smaller pieces, but this often resulted in injury, looking like an idiot if it was unintentional, looking like a brute if it was, and worst of all, the scattering of thousands of tiny, sharp shards of glass that are impossible to see, will always cut you, and will continue to turn up even years after the incident. For these reasons, it is not recommended that you break glass.

Nick was an intelligent fly, and as such, the reasons listed above played no part in his decision to fly away in search of a different entrance.

As he circled low to the ground, he caught sight of movement, slow as it was. He turned, and headed for the tiny thing on the ground, partially because he hoped it would know how to get inside, and mostly because he was growing board.

He discovered as he drew closer, that the tiny amount of movement was coming from a snail by one of the doors. Its yellow shell stood out against the inch or so of snow that covered the ground around it. Its eyes bobbed and weaved in the slight wind.

Nick couldn’t shake the feeling that he had seen the snail before. Something about the thick slime trail it left in its wake, or the way its eyes seemed to squint in hatred whenever the wind blew.

The fly landed behind the creature, shaking off the tiny amount of snow that powdered his back.

“What do you want?” the snail asked quickly, obviously annoyed by the mere presence of the boy. The nasty attitude stirred something in Nick, and he was quickly able to recall where he knew the snail from.

“You’re the snail from the sidewalk!” he shouted in surprise as he rushed over to the bug.

The snail scoffed at him. “No, I’m not stupid enough to go on any sidewalks.”

“No,” Nick insisted. “Your defiantly the same snail.”

“Listen,” the snail said, turning its eye stocks towards the fly. “I know that flies are one of the least intelligent creatures on this earth, but try to get this through that thick, fat, skull of yours. I don’t know you. I never did know you, and I don’t want to know you now. So how about you take your disgusting, garbage eating body, and crawl up something else’s ass? (Foreshadowing perhaps?) That sound like something you could do?”

Nick, undeterred and unoffended, pushed on. “I know you’re the same snail. Don’t try to say otherwise.”

“Oh, I get it,” the snail replied with an attitude that closely resembled that of Nick’s sister when she was on her period. Not actually mean, but bitchy. “You think that all snails look the same, don’t you? Where just one big colony of air swallowing, cheesecake eating, racecar driving, penguin tail steeling inbreeds, don’t you?” These, of course, where stereotypes of the highest offence that plagued the snail community, at least with other bugs.  

The term, air swallowing, came from the fact that slugs did not breath, but gulped down air, much as a drowning man does after he is rescued from the clutches of a giant squid, and is pulled from the water into a rather sizable finishing boat.

Cheesecake eating comes from France, where cheesecake is often times thrown out, simply because there is to damn much of it. This being the case, France has been thought of as the leader in bug/cheesecake interactions. France is also known for eating snails. So, when a snail is called a cheesecake eater, it is basically saying that they are a snail in France, and will therefor be eaten by a smelly French man.

Racecar driving is not a stereotype, the snail simply could not think of another quickly enough. In fact, most snails’ dream of going at high speeds, so being a racecar driver would be horrible. A snail doesn’t know how to drive, so they would crash almost instantly. Come to think of it, this would actually be a decent insult.

The final slur is from unknown origins, but has been around since the time of the dinosaurs. Even the great snail historians have failed to find an actual meaning behind it. Not surprising given the fact that snails are generally poor at archeology. The saying has never changed since then, and most likely will never change.

“No!” Nick burst out. As a white kid, he was always jumpy around any mention of racism, even if it was to snails.

“Save it planet buster!” the snail shouted. “Just leave me alone!”

The phrase, planet buster, comes from a long ago story where a fly flew into a very important piece of machinery that resulted in the cataclysmic explosion that doomed planet H-Raven, the Galactic Rebellion, and thousands of poor, defenseless, snails. This is, by the very definition of life, truth, and bug kind, a story for another time.

The cold iron door behind the pair of insects swung open, a blast of warm air flying out from the exposed crack. Nick noticed the movement, but the poor snail, enveloped so completely with its rant against the fly, was caught off guard.

“Hey dude, its cold out here,” a human said above them as he walked out of the door, stepping over the pair. Nick looked up in surprise as the giant walked overhead. Meanwhile, the snail was beginning to turn a nasty shade of red as its anger grew, spewing hate slang in such a quantity that had not been heard since Mel Gibson first became angry with a black person.

Lets all take a moment to recall the fact that Mel Gibson once said, “Get raped by a pack of niggers.” My favorite part of that is the fact that he said, pack.

It was because of this that Nick felt almost no sorrow when the giant behind the first one stepped out into the world, and onto the tiny snail. With a crunch, all aspects of the snail where erased from existence, its body crumbling under the massive weight of the high school student.

“Who,” the boy said as he lifted his shoe, gunk trailing from the sole of his foot to the ground. “I think I stepped in something.”

Nick didn’t wait to find out what happened next, or even to marvel at the speed at which karma worked. Scents poured out of the lunchroom, enveloping his entire being. He wafted, much like a character would do in a cartoon, into the lunchroom, the door swinging shut behind him.

“Damn,” the crumpled form of the snail said. “Just when I was so close to world domination.”