He was a good looking man, though not the kind you’d find in movies or magazines. In fact, despite his relatively pleasant appearance, the man was almost entirely unphotogenic. Those same qualities that gave him his handsome appearance in person were somehow lost as soon as they were plucked from the boxy and bulbous world we live in and folded down into two dimensions.

This caused his mother considerable annoyance whenever family photos were taken. She had always blamed it on his high cheekbones, but she told him they looked elegant.

His teeth were off-white, and straight enough not to draw any extra attention, but they fit strangely into his skull and jaw and he found them uncomfortable to bite down on.

His eyes were blue, his nose straight with a little hump in it, and his ears just a bit too small for his head, but only just.

He wore his curly brown hair long enough to cover them anyway.

The man didn’t spend much time outside, and it showed. He had the hands of someone who rarely used them in labor, and tendon and sinew were visible when moved his fingers. The bags under his eyes made him look perpetually drowsy, and much of the time his demeanor and attitude matched his outward appearance; he was a dull man.

There was little that excited or interested him, and the older he became, the more this became the case.

His death, on the other hand, was exciting to those unfortunate enough to witness it.

It was maggots that killed him.

Without warning they burst from his eyes, and wriggled their way down his handsome nose with the little hump and up into his nostrils. Some made their way into his mouth, past his uneven grin and his off-white teeth, straight-enough teeth, and down his throat. The rest shimmied along his elegantly high cheekbones into his just too small ears where they quickly traversed his ear canal and began what turned out to be a hasty journey to the brain.

And so, as he died, he tasted, heard and smelled the flavors, sounds and scents of one million little maggots devouring his pale, dull and unlabored flesh.

He wasn’t able to see them though, because it was from his eyes that they had emerged in the first place.