A Swarm Called Mavis

Mavis snuck in through the bedroom window. It was open just a crack, so she came in a particle at a time and then reconfigured above Neville's work bench. Neville was on deadline, too busy to look up and notice the yellow cloud swirling there.

Mavis started humming then. This got Neville's attention. If she'd had ears, he would have shouted, "Stop!" There was no way the two of them were ever going to blend. Neville was a pure-bred, rock-solid, diamond-hard singularity. He didn't do blending. What he did do was work almost nonstop. When he wasn't working, he was eating and sleeping. It was a simple life. Simple suited Neville due to the austerity of his configuration. He was a unified whole and any external organs were firmly attached; for instance, unlike Mavis, Neville had ears. This meant he was vulnerable. If sounds could get in, other things could get in too. This was what Mavis must've thought since her particles were forever bombarding Neville's ears, trying to gain entrance, mimicking the manic maneuverings of Mavis.

But how could this be? Had she infected him somehow? Had a few stray bits of her finally managed to breach his defenses, entering his body, working to deconstruct it from within?

"STOP!" he screamed, but the hovering just intensified both inside and out. Desperate to drive Mavis away, he grabbed a broom and started swatting the air. He thrashed wildly, knocking over furniture, smashing light fixtures, but not one jot of Mavis was injured or the slightest bit deterred. Her particles merely dipped and dived, deftly evading each swipe of the broom. Within seconds, Neville's house was a shambles and he was exhausted. He dropped the broom and collapsed to the floor.

Through the rest of the day and deep into the night he lay there. His deadline came and went and still he kept on dozing. Huddled on the bare floor he shivered from the cold and in response to weird nightmares where flocks of birds were pecking his eyes. As he fought them, their feathers came loose and stuck to his skin, soft and supple, warming him deep into the unmoored motes within his bones.

When Neville finally awoke, he was wrapped in a blanket of Mavis. Her particles had enveloped him. Outrageous! He leapt to his feet, shaking off the particles. He was about to tell them off, to say they should never cling to him again, but then there was a knock at the door.

It was a delivery man with a package, the new secret weapon he'd ordered. As he unpacked it, he almost felt guilty. Mavis was just trying to connect with him, but he had a job to do. If he let her continue bothering him, she would be placing his whole future at risk.

Neville's new secret weapon was the opposite of this old secret weapon. It didn't suck particles from the air. It sprayed them out. The particles this sprayer sprayed were deadly. This was why Neville knew there would be no turning back.

A surprising sadness came over him as he placed the sprayer next to his work bench anticipating the next intrusion of his nemesis. When she approached again, she did so timidly. Perhaps sensing his dark mood, a few of her faintest particles flitted near the edge of his peripheral field. At first, he ignored them, but gradually, a few more appeared, then a few more.

Eventually, Neville seized the sprayer and pointed it at Mavis. At that moment, he heard a loud buzzing. Strangely, it was not coming from particles in front of him. It was coming from the particles inside his body!

He began to shiver again and realized the window was still open and a cold breeze was blowing in. As he closed the window, he cursed the day Mavis first arrived and began wrecking his life. He also remembered waking with Mavis wrapped around him, making him feel warm and secure.

This was the most infuriating thing about her: this damnable inconsistency, the way she was always more than one thing: both a friend and a foe, a mob and a miasma, a marching band and a mosh pit. Worst of all, she was always trying to expose his contradictions, accusing him of being just as inconsistent as her. Entertaining such dire thoughts gave Neville pause.

Sensing his hesitation, Mavis seized the sprayer from his hands and chucked it across the room. It sailed through the closed window, shattering its glass, then disappeared. Seeing this, Neville flew into his worst rage yet. He grabbed the broom again and swatted it wildly, missing Mavis but destroying the parts of his house he had not destroyed before, working himself into a righteous lather.

Eventually, he got so upset, he threw himself against the door, hit his head and fell to the ground, unconscious.

As Mavis again watched Neville shivering on the floor, she felt a familiar urge to wrap herself around him, but something held her back this time, or rather some things — plural. The things that held her back were the particles she could hear humming away inside Neville's body. These portions of him were the source of his shivering. They were the parts not neatly decided and coherent, the aspects that were dying to break free and reject any sense of internal consistency.

Determined to honor these unsettled elements of her dear friend, Mavis summoned the strength of all her particles to roll him over.

Once he was facing the ceiling, some of her particles pulled up his shirt. The particles that were surgeons began working on his navel. They sank deep into it, cutting through scar tissue, gradually untying the knotted mass, returning it to its original state, a tube providing vital ingress for nutrients, but also, in this instance, providing vital egress for something else, the parts of Neville that no longer wished to be contained.