Now that your parents are gone, your childhood home is up for sale. You live too far away to visit, so your brother sends you a link to the virtual viewing. The house has never looked so clean and spacious. The rooms are as bare as an art gallery before a show. There’s no sign that your parents ever lived here. Couldn’t the estate agents have at least left the painting of the old bridge on the wall, or the otter ornament on the mantelpiece? Would that really have deterred buyers? You navigate from room to room, marvelling at how spotless everything is. Your mother would be proud. Even the smell of your father’s pipe tobacco is gone. Entering the kitchen, you notice the swing top bin is still there. Makes sense: the estate agents might need to throw things away. Then you notice that the lid is pendulating very slightly. You tap the magnifying glass icon, and the bin gets larger. The definition is amazing. Little white shapes are moving around inside the container, making the lid swing. At first you can’t tell what they are, but when you zoom closer they come into focus. The bin is full of thousands, maybe millions, of maggots, writhing around and spilling on the floor. You remember the time on the farm when, as a child, you came across a dead lamb in a field. You turned it over with your wellington boot and found it was infested with maggots. You were too young to know what they were, but you knew there was something uncanny about these tiny creatures. There were too many of them.