My parasitic worms hate me. I know this because they love to belittle me while I wait in line for rations at the soil depot.
Fucking idiot’s going to ask for more again. Just take the soil, don’t make a scene. There’s only three of us, what would you even do with more?
My parasitic worms like to remind me how few of them there are. I am not aware of when it happened, but they writhed upwards through my faculties to their current perch beside my brain in what feels a coordinated effort to shame me as directly as possible for that particular misfortune. Despite being so far under my skin, their words never cut deep. The world has conditioned me too well for that.
“Here’s your sad little sprinkle of shit dirt,” says Frulp, the soil merchant, shaking my near-empty tray of fresh earth over his rancid counter when I reach the front of the queue. His worms dangle from his eyeballs, spilling out and drooping over his open lids, performing their girth at me in fat, mocking spirals.
“You will regret treating me like this when I become wormful,” I say. “I am not like the rest of these clean-organed troglodytes with no hope of escaping from fetid drudgery. I am destined for greater things.”
The line of clean-organed troglodytes with no hope of escaping from their fetid drudgery that waits behind me responds with glares, those whose vision is not obstructed by open sores or flaked forehead scab, of which I count three at most.
“You want your soil or not, dry boy?” Frulp says.
We want the soil. Tell him we want it.
“I will not accept such a pittance. You must give me more, the same you would give to any other wormful.”
“Well I guess that’s gonna be a no, then.”
Mother fucking asshole! What did we just say!? You’re going to starve us, you prideful little shit snorter!
As short-sighted as they are, I cannot blame them for their outrage, but I do wish they would stop calling me a shit snorter. I do not do that.
There is no denying that I feel a niggle of hunger as I walk home along the sandy path towards the mines. The journey across town from the depot to my den is a long one, uphill and perforated like a wide, flat honeycomb by trapdoor burrow entrances. Even with daily practice I stumble over the displaced lumps of Earth from the wormfuls’ continued home renovation, which is rumored to have reached as far as bedrock in some burrows, those belonging to people of great import whose bodies are little more than a layer of filmy skin wrapped around a colony of flat grubs. I tingle at the thought of becoming that filled. When I do I will take my burrow deeper, I will break the bedrock and ferry my worms to the everdark. The lumps I will displace will tower above the mountains themselves and crush the unworthy wormless who dare to tread upon them, I think, as I trip over a knee-high lump.
This kind of shit wouldn’t happen if you just took the soil. Look at him, so hungry he can’t even walk straight. Going to crack that empty head open one of these days.
I do not feel the sharp stone slice into my forearm, but I feel the sand inside the wound, cold from the night’s bitter air.
“Where do you think you’re walking, dry boy?” says someone who is not my worms.
I crane my neck up to see three humanoid shapes. The surfaces of their bodies writhe of their own accord. I believe they are Smud, Ruggle, and Doogs, the young wormfuls who sometimes come to spit at me from atop the cliffside while I toil at the mines. Evidence suggests it is some sort of game for them, as I hear quantities of points called out based on where their fluids land. Striking me in the eyes and mouth warrants as many as fifty, which I take as an acknowledgment of my body’s value. They seem to have emerged from the burrow I just tripped over, what is likely their inconveniently placed home.
“Smud,” I try, unsure. After the worms take over key signifying features like ears and noses, identification becomes a process of guesswork and processing context clues. “I seem to have tripped over some of your loose earth. I will not hold it against you, however, as I am sure you would never intentionally injure your future neighbor.”
My forgiveness is answered with a heavy boot on my back driving me groundwards the instant I attempt to stand.
“I don’t think you get what’s happening here,” says a different shape I believe to be Ruggle or Doogs based on a speculative process of elimination. “You have to apologize to us. You haven’t apologized yet.”
“Apologized for what, might I ask?”
“For touching our property with your dry, disgusting body,” says the third shape.
I consider pointing out it was in fact their property that touched me, given their excavation is expanding while my route remains unchanged, but before I can offer this constructive rebuttal their boots are stomping me into incapacitation.
“One more chance,” says a shape, I am not sure which. “Say you’re sorry and that you’re a dried-out, wormless bone wad, and maybe we let you walk away.”
I can feel the soles of their feet squirming with nutrient-rich parasites while they press into my back. Like the soil man and his eyes, they too mock me.
“Soon,” I squeeze out from under their weight, “you will regret treating me like this.”
The tickle is removed and soon I do not feel anything at all on account of my trodden-on spine. At some point the trio are no longer there. I am alone, nonconsensually prone in the middle of the path. Rather, almost alone.
Saw that one coming a mile away. Call them back, maybe if they give you another you’ll fucking learn something for once. Shocker they didn’t scoop you up and give you a hug.
Slivers of light run through my periphery. The sun will be rising soon. If I stay here much longer I will be roasted into steam and dust and blow away with the wind, my body as unfortunately dry as it is. Moving will be painful in this state, but it remains the more alluring of my two options.
I take stock of my myself in preparation to stand. The stone wound swells with the beginnings of green infection. Bruises rise where boots slid off my blood-slicked back and connected with my arms. I expected more from those with so many worms at their disposal. They should be ashamed that I can still walk.
I am not angered by my fourteen-hour shifts in the soil mines. They are a necessary part of proving myself capable of becoming wormful. I am not angered by the foul smell of the mine shafts. The salt-water rains punish the earth and fill it with rot, forcing us deeper into the cliffside in search of uncontaminated soil, a natural and stink laden phenomenon unavoidable in this land – hating it would be a waste of energy. But what I hate with a fury that has only escalated in my many years here is holding these abominations they call tools. The equipment provided to break through rock and minerals has not been replaced in my lifetime, or the lifetime of mines themselves, begging the eternally unanswered question of where they possibly could have arrived from. The same trowels and pickaxes have been tied and nailed back together into inoperable scrap sticks that do more damage to us than to the rocks, ripping into my bleeding hands as I now hammer away at sediment several thousand feet of wooden scaffolding into uncharted rock face. With my bruised arms it feels like grabbing wet fire with two long, melting candlesticks.
Hurts, doesn’t it? Just go home and lie down before you kill yourself. No one even cares, you can break every rock in the world, they’re not giving you shit.
I swing my pickaxe down, feel my arm give way, and hear my bone pop, the sound echoing back down the cavernous labor hole.
“You all right there, young pip?” asks an elderly man pegging a stake into some loose stones. His torch illuminates a facial rash peeling back several layers of greying skin. I cannot fathom why my worms hate me when heaps of absolute excrement like this hopeless excuse for a person exist.
“I do not believe I was talking to you, old man,” I say, and continue swinging at the boulder using my limp arm like a slingshot. He makes no effort to respond to me, but there is a long quiet before I hear the sound of his frail stake again. When that silence is broken I am reminded of his putrid face and stifle vomit.
You really want to wither and flake away like that old slop tower over there? Take the day off, you’re fucking useless right now. Even more useless than normal.
My other arm goes limp. I continue swinging at the boulder.
“Young pip, you might want to slow down.”
I ignore the man. When I try to raise my pick again, I bring it above my head and my arms snap.
I am unconscious before I hit the ground. That or my body is so numb I do not feel the impact. Either way I wake up and my foreman, Spitz, a large man or woman or thing with grubs coming through cracks in his skull and drooping across its person face like flaccid tail feathers, is the first thing I see upon regaining consciousness, shaking me by my frayed collar.
“You gotta get the fuck outta here until you stop doing all that,” says Spitz. It or he or something therein has never been elegant with words but this mixture of sounds is particularly hard to discern meaning from.
“I do not plan to do it again if that is what you are suggesting,” I say.
“Nobody plans it, but it can’t be happening here. I’m not losing a perfectly good pick cause your bones shit themselves and you bring half the mountain down.”
“You understand this pick is terrible. There is not even wood left in the handle, it is only nails. I am fairly sure the only thing holding them together is dried blood. If anything it is more my scab than it is your pick, so you have no real claim to fear for its survival.”
Spitz is not responsive to my constructive criticism. As if it was not she or it who brought up his shambolic equipment in the first place. I am officially uninvited from my position at the mines until Sptiz decides otherwise, despite my reminder that it will regret treating me like this when I become wormful.
At least it is a short walk back to my den, which I am forced to writhe into along the muddy floor without the use of my arms and with a numb right leg I calculate must have been crushed at some point while I was unconscious. Short, but not short enough to escape the salt rains. I am drenched and crystallized by the time I arrive home. The sodium flakes rise to the surface of my clay dome and the air inside stings on contact.
This sucks doesn’t it. Pretty much total shit. And it’s just going to be more of this, every day, until you stop chasing this ridiculous dream they’ll never let you have. Do you have any idea how infuriating it is to watch you do this to yourself? Very! It is very!
That is when I realize that, for once, my worms may have a point.
The wormfuls will never willingly accept me as I am. In their eyes, what little surface area is not covered by grubs, I am just more flaky scum dolloped onto this town’s great scum heap. They do not know what I know. They do not see what I see. They lack the vision I was gifted with to peer past the illusion of the present and need a clearer image drawn for them to understand the shape of things to come.
I will just have to draw them that image.
The wormfuls are funny ones, locking their burrows while they leave the keys inches away under conspicuous dirt piles. It does not surprise me that they assume we of few forms lack the intelligence to see through such a remedial ruse, that they did not account for me. But I still cannot help smiling as I drop into the first level of the burrow.
The floor is empty, as is the second level when I descend farther. The earth grows soft the deeper I progress and by the third level it feels like my aching feet are walking over moist cotton.
It is not until the fifth level that I encounter another living being. I ease open a heavy wooden door and find a person inside, prone atop a bushel of stitched twine, sleeping, it seems, from the slow, unbothered rise and fall of their body. Even when I stand over their bedside they do not know I am here. How could they when their whole clan is so blind?
As soft as the dirt below my feet is, their stomach is softer, half digested by their parasites and hanging like a flaccid sack around their innards, their skin nothing more than a suggestion. It is a suggestion I choose to ignore as my hand pushes through their belly and feels hundreds of little beings squirming at the shock of their surprise invitation to the world. I welcome them with an embrace, my fingers closing tight around their bodies.
Before their host has time to scream I greet them as well. I bury a fist inside their mouth to prevent any unneeded sounds. The portrait is not yet ready and I do not wish to confuse them. If only they could show a modicum of patience and stop their thrashing. My numb arms absorb their struggle without much complaint, but it still proves a momentary annoyance.
Their protest lasts less than a minute. It is a shame it had to come to this, that they could not handle this civilly, but I have never been one to shirk from sacrifice in the name of greater things. The worms continue to move after they grow still, which comforts me enough to pry my hand from the host’s idling jaw. The prize is unharmed and I can now proceed uninterrupted with the transference.
Such a sudden change may be jarring. I can understand this. So to ensure the travelers do not arrive plagued with homesickness, I pry some additional visage from their former dwelling to help smooth the transition. Something to give a hint of familiarity. It provides the added benefit of lubrication for the new residents, helping them slide through my entryway on a current of red.
Once all the stragglers are accounted for, it is time to return to the surface. The walk back to my den feels shorter now. My body may be heavier, but it moves with newfound ease. Like a machine whose pieces have finally clicked into place.
It is not until I am home, and I lie on the ground beside a simple fire of sticks and tar, that my worms speak to me again.
There sure are a lot of them. Not sure I like the look of these guys. It’s not too late to stop this, you know. Maybe if you take them back-¬
Then the voices respond, drowning them out. In an instant it becomes overwhelming. There is no way to tell who is talking, what any of them are saying, all of it is the same noise, a sound like crackling foam in my brain, traveling through my blood and choking my circulation with warm, damp stuffing. When I give myself over to the wave, when I let myself get lost in the froth, it is ecstasy. I am so full I cannot move, cannot think, or rather, have transcended thinking into a realm of only sensation. Even as a I try to conjure a picture of the mines, of Frulp and his filthy counter top, nothing comes. They are gone, wiped from my new reality.
I know, at last, what it means to be wormful. It is a place, not physical, not rational, but a space hidden in the gaps in the fabric of our world that I have found, opened up, and arrived in. And I know that I am staying for a long time.
“Wake him up!” cries a voice, before a searing sensation returns to my right side.
I am able to hear sounds, objects scraping along rough ground, but my vision remains blank. Feeling reawakens along my spine, which presses against something dense, something I do not need to see to recognize as a boulder. I have spent enough time digging through rocks to know that I am now restrained to one.
There are too many voices talking and I cannot determine which are inside and which are outside, nor what any of them are saying. There are scraps, enough fragmentary tones to tell me that whatever is happening is frantic and significant, and that I am at the center of it.
The combination of these factors plants a seed of dread that begins to grow even before my eyes open and I see the familiar faces of Frulp and Spitz, former employer and mushy-eyed depot cashier. There are others I recognize as well, or who at least appear familiar in the contour and coloration of their masses. One of them though, who I cannot recollect, seems to take particular interest in me, moving in close to my person and flapping the gaps in their worm amalgam face shape as though they are communicating things of great urgency to me, none of which makes it through the crackle of my head foam.
Several others appear to say things. Spitz wags a finger at me, in what looks like accusatory fashion. A slither of spit bulges into my eye line, I can only assume from above where the likes of Ruggle or Doogs have set up a vantage point for hocking. When each attendee seems to have finished their business with me and dispersed I remain tied to the rock. Only the unfamiliar one with the flapping face, which now lies still and fixed in my direction, remains behind, standing beneath the shade of a lumpy hill.
The sun breaches the cliffs and stabs off the reflective sand like white needles into my eyes. I lose sight of the flapper, but I begin to smell something damp and metallic that, when I notice sticky condensation clinging to my exposed stomach, I know is my own skin burning and my blood evaporating. If nothing is done the worms inside me will become exposed and flee in search of dark shelter. I will be emptied out. A vacant host, a husk, steaming from dawn to nightfall until I am seared into smoking hair and bones.
It does not take long to appraise my circumstances and deliberate that they are unlikely to change along my desired timeline. When my skin is burned thin enough to tear, the parasites start their mass evacuation. They break open their own exit and stream out as fast as they came in. The noise froth settles to a boil weak enough that I can hear stray phrases hurled by those on their way out.
What did he think would happen? Dumb dry fuck. Got what he deserved.
They continue in this general vein of indignant grievance airing until my insides are quiet. I am alone with my thoughts, entirely solitary for the first time since I found those three all those years ago, cast out and dissolving in a puddle of salt rain. That day felt like an invitation, a harbinger of my prosperity, a map of my life’s journey placed there for me to find. I wonder now if that feeling was incorrect, or if I simply read the map wrong.
Wow, that sure was fucking embarrassing. I mean good riddance to those pompous toe slugs but still, that’s gotta hurt. They really hated it in here. You should’ve heard the shit they were talking. Actually, probably good you didn’t.
The door is open but for some reason those three are still here, baking under sunlight beside my toasted brain. Could it be that my parasitic worms hate me so much they are willing to die just to get in a final barrage of jabs? Or was I wrong about them? Are their feelings more complex than raw hatred?
Well, you dumb mother fuck, here we are. Tried to warn you so many times this was how it’d turn out and what’d you go and do? Oh that’s right, you ate a man’s stomach, didn’t you, you abject reprobate shit-snorting ego whore. But hey, we had a pretty good run there, didn’t we? Thanks for bringing us along, dumb ass.
I lack the brain cells to process what they are saying. All I can tell is that it is warm here, at what I have accepted is my end. That it should be unbearably so, mercilessly scalding, but that it is only warm. And that there is quiet here. Not the blankness planting my head in froth, but real quiet. And it is still as well. No soil to mine, beatings to endure, wormfuls to convince of my existence’s value.
Above all, what I feel is that I am not alone here. There are others who are with me, who chose to stay. And that is how I know where I am, what this warm, quiet, still place is. I have been here all along, if only I had slowed down and observed objectively enough to notice. For my last few breaths of stinging air, I notice, and I am wormful.
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Sean McDonald is a New York-based writer who works in the closely related fields of children’s TV and literary horror. As a screenwriter, he’s contributed to animated series for Konami and the educational program SuperDville. As a human, he has a 19-year-old arthritic cat and occasionally writes half-baked movie reviews on the only form of social media he knows how to use: https://boxd.it/21Fan. |