Worms in Love
WORMS IN LOVE
I.
On the day Gelsomina contracted worms, she was no different from who she had always been—an animal walking on all fours. The old French Bulldog rifled through leather flowers and fruit bushes. She rolled in dry soil and sniffed the back of a fallen starling. Her thirst propelled her to the murky backyard pond. Gelsomina lapped water and blue-green foam, gulping suspended pollen and minibeasts.
As she drank, an opaque egg rushed into her system carrying five parasitic worms, migrating from the lungs to the liver, down to the small intestine, and hatched within two weeks. Three of the worms died, the remaining two were slow to reproduce.
Compact and muscular; a large, square head; wrinkles above a brachycephalic nose; and in the bloated stomach, two worms resting. Before being consumed by Gelsomina, the worms had been lumped together in damp soil. They could feel the vibrations of footsteps, the mist rising off the water and brushing up against their yellow egg. Their bisexual forms mangled and made loud pops like champagne corks. When they hatched, the worms’ surroundings were dark, and they had only each other. They recoiled at the stillness of the three dead worms and together cohered like a ball of thread.
At first the worms had been in love. Prone to monogamy; quiet and entangled. Together they traversed her interior like bucking goats. They kept their backs to each other, wrenching forward when their bare sides brushed. Gelsomina’s trunk weighed heavily with their anger. They fought about space and time, an argument hashed out in the fetal position.
To envision the worms, Gelsomina closed her eyes and imagined them intertwined like yarn. They made her a little sick with their hysteria, the way they craved to bicker and thrash within her. The little creatures had no idea that lost love was as good as any other.
Gelsomina did not know if the two worms were meant to be. To be, she had learned, is a union that implies fate. A line drawn from one to the other. Gelsomina did not believe that she had a line. Rather, she orbited. At the center of her revolutions there was a house in the shape of a box.
Her daily labors were all she had ever wanted: to observe the premises, subtly warn of intruders, and sleep. She had never been with another, in love nor maternity. For this, she believed the worms were her punishment for refusing someone in and letting no one out.
II.
Over one-hundred years of life and all that had changed for Gelsomina was the way she walked. Arthritis had caused her hips to curl further beneath her. She led lonely decades, but that was not the sole reason for her suffering. It was a disposition she had inherited at birth.
Gelsomina had been born by the sea veiled in an amniotic sac she had to break to breathe. A soft bulb syringe was used to remove fetal fluids from her throat before she was held upside down and shaken vigorously to flush out mucus. Her tongue went from blue to pink. Lastly, she was placed in a warm box.
Ever since, Gelsomina had accepted her dim life, one that resembled the uniformity of the vast coastal landscape. The waves receded and advanced. Fate nor destiny made sense to her unless she had been destined to relive the same day.
There were no migrations or hibernations. She had not even gone upstairs. Importantly, Gelsomina had never prayed. She had never practiced methods of giving. Sex was opaque. Rain was a hindrance to bowel movements. Food was regular and monochromatic. She had never killed. A virgin to experience, the worms residing within Gelsomina were her first scratch at life.
She would not say she had always been bored, for her anxiety about daily matters kept her heart beating and mind alert. Gelsomina’s tendencies were limited to the governance of critters, a desire to be smaller, and sudden bursts of mania relinquished in short sprints. Before the lovers, there were no life events that had split her open, telling her this is how you will live now. There was no reflex that she had constructed for change, no fortitude against the unknown.
So, when the lovers arrived, she found herself numbly bearing the worst of their residence. She was perfectly still with the pain. The colours around her were brighter and the sounds louder. Happiness, because the worms brought this emotion, too, was contemplated in a hushed, motionless stance.
Of the other things to know about Gelsomina: she loved darkness, her flower was jasmine, and a gift from God was her name.
III.
While alone outside, Gelsomina looked for the fox. She told herself it was the fox’s orange colour that impelled her search. Or perhaps it was the fox’s fur, long and coarse, and not the colour, which drew Gelsomina to look for it beneath the lavender bushels. For the first time she wished to sink her face into another’s body. At night, from inside the house, she could hear the foxes' calls. One howled and barked. A vixen let loose a bloodcurdling squeal—it was looking for love.
Rarely did she see the fox. Her cataracted eyes followed the sun’s trick orange light until they reached a pond in the backyard. A phantom fox tail dragged itself down the center of the water. She turned her attention to a bush where she heard a rustling in its caverns. It was usually a squirrel, or a few small birds.
One day, she saw a worm wriggling across the soil. Another appeared, covered in dew. They slithered on the waterline and wrapped around each other. The worms sensed Gelsomina, then lost interest and floated on the pond surrounded by insects and flower petals.
The appearance of the first pair then revealed many others.. They spontaneously somersaulted into grass. The purple ends of their tubular forms were compared amongst themselves before collectively raising a ripe raspberry. Like dancers, the worms leapt, twisted, and curled.
It was not the first time Gelsomina had come across the worms, though they did not show themselves every day. The one time she had seen them before, Gelsomina had been walking aimlessly, tasting bitter red soil, when the sun hit her in the face. It was around three in the afternoon and the sequence presented itself to her as a nativity scene.
Gelsomina witnessed twenty lovers, or ten pairs of worms, pushing a quail egg out of shallow water, which cracked against the rocks and oozed clear liquid. They rubbed the yolk on their tubes by rolling, then rinsed in the pond.
Without meaning to, Gelsomina imagined the worms in her mouth, and because she could not grasp their ritual, and because she grew ill at the feeling of the glazed bodies between her teeth, she left.
IV.
On the day she was cursed with the worms, Gelsomina stayed to observe them. She kneaded her paws on hot stones. Randomly, one stone beneath her turned cold. It talked to her about living; such as the memory of trees and the proliferation of species in many different forms; how stories happen all at once. Gelsomina had no clear revelation. Though smooth, the stone was not gentle with her. It sensed that she had refused to love in a world she despised. It was a position she did not know was wrong.
The stone gestured to the miniature pairs engorged on berries. It told her that she would be cursed with a pair of worms who would be housed within her for sixty days. She would learn from them how to love, and in this way become part of the world. The worms would then leave her body as though they were born, meaning that Gelsomina would lay an egg from which two weeks later the lovers would hatch.
As Gelsomina deciphered the stone’s message, a weight grew inside her. It felt like she had eaten something heavy and rotten. With this, she lost an essential organization of self, built across decades. She had an innate sense of each worm, their movements, and feelings. The invasion was profound.
The worms were not happy with their situation either. They explored the small surroundings of Gelsomina’s organs. It was small and inhibitive. As she made her way back inside, Gelsomina’s belly swelled with their intimacy.
V.
They say that if you come across a worm, it’s about time you take a good look at your life. The worm will show you that by interacting with the world, you will feed your body, mind, and soul. Notably, if you kill a worm, you kill your luck.
VI.
The worms’ first forty days within Gelsomina were not easy. They missed water spilling into marshland, moon swapping for sun. Most of their time was spent trying to decipher their surroundings. The noises they heard were not that different from those of their subterranean home, but the feeling was nothing like it.
The worms guessed they were in a cave by the water. The walls did not feel like rock, more like dampened leather which pulsed. It was strange, the lovers agreed. All they had witnessed after emerging from the ground was a wrinkled creature standing on a blue-gray stone. The worms mused and wondered whether they had eaten a poisonous mushroom and were now living an afterlife.
Once they realized they were stuck, the worms knocked their tiny heads and tails on Gelsomina’s insides. They yelled for help. Occasionally their voices pierced through. We envy the stone; we envy the stone.
Worms and stones form an intricate history. Along the waterbed, stones are living worms’ fossilized ancestors. The ribbed bodies encased in white bulge from the flat plane of rock. Often there are imprints of two worms resting side-by-side.
The worms considered whether they were transforming from flesh to stone. The pondering, ranting, and crying continued for days. Each of their five hearts pumped blood through two throbbing vessels. The worms worried that if they could not reach the surface, the pores across their bodies would suffocate.
VII.
Listening to the lovers, Gelsomina remembered the stone’s orders: she must learn from the worms how to love and in this way become part of the world. Gelsomina was never meant to love. It had been written out of her body at a young age. Briefly, she allowed a question to form about the stories she chose to tell herself concerning her own body: Was there yearning?
During moments of rage while following the orange light of the fox she felt an obscure urge in an area near where the lovers now lived. It was an impulse to go forward, confusing violence with longing. That was all, Gelsomina thought of her propulsions to be intimate, that was all.
With instinct alone she began with the birds. In view through the window of the home, an entire flock measured out on a railing. They were gray with a smattering of teal and lilac along the neck. Gelsomina had always found them beautiful—their delicate feathers spreading like hands, the way they synchronized their landings. There were sixteen. She noticed how small their heads were, and even smaller beaks.
From within the house, Gelsomina bowed her head to the birds, then flipped onto her back in submission. She arched her neck to look at them. A few had taken flight in reaction to her movements. Then, she stood to pee. Within her own expanding puddle, Gelsomina watched the remaining birds fly away, two-by-two.
Gelsomina did not contemplate nonexistence, a place that is nowhere and therefore should not be feared. Though, as she aged, she felt herself getting smaller. Her suffering would at some point cease, for a thing so small should not feel so much pain.
VIII.
What is love but the desecration of time, its simultaneous expansion and contraction, the feeling that decades have been marshaled into a few weeks?
Gelsomina formed a deep belief in love. She kept tabs on the worms’ relationship like a new mother and her sleeping baby. From her limited perspective, she most wanted the lovers to lay eggs within her as an exemplary symbol of their union.
The worms—with their mirrored anatomies—were to touch head-to-end, head-to-head, and end-to-end; connected by their centers, and wrapped in mucus. But the lovers were speaking less. They were touching less. The lovers were unfamiliar to each other.
IX.
The days ballooned with boredom. Gelsomina heaved the two lovers who refused to speak. Her torso bulged with the separation of their bodies, which were usually smaller, packaged as one. Gelsomina paused to catch her breath and glimpse into the pond’s brown depths.
Silverfish the size of thumbs swam in disorderly schools. Their slick bodies dispersed at the sight of her. What remained were mere flecks in the water. She wished to be that fleck, that one too; to be one of many, floating and light.
She turned around in agony as the sun rose higher and the birds slammed their bodies into the windows of the house. One after another their teal necks bent to the glass. Flashes of pink feet and black eyes; regular thuds. She recognized one of the birds from the days before by its heart-shaped birthmark. Amid this violence, spindly branches reached for the light.
Gelsomina thought that the lovers were more than enough to fulfill her end years. She considered whether the lovers were a sign that time was running out—and what had she done with her life?
Hundreds of tadpoles had become tiny translucent frogs scattershot across the rocks. She admired their sorbet-colored organs; eggs, like limes, crowded along a single, central vein.
The frogs’ vocal sacs inflated beneath thin lips. Nostrils closed, and the air vibrated against the lungs letting out a trilling song. Listening to the symphony, the French Bulldog was lost in thought about how she, too, had begun in water.
X.
Gelsomina’s happiness now relied on the worms falling back in love. There seemed to be no way out of them. Or for them, no way out of her. She turned her attention to each moment, for otherwise her mind wandered to the effort it would take to find the stone’s cold back. Gelsomina sat on her hind legs in pain.
The lovers woke with their heads interlocked. It was as if they suddenly remembered one another. Entangled, they whispered each other’s names, my pair. They took turns telling stories of the world before its end, a time when creatures held raspberries overhead.
Relief came when one wrapped around the other. Their heads stacked, and the day broke open. When the lovers were not fighting, they were like the feeling of a good weight, like pressure on a wound. Gelsomina swayed with them.
She danced as they made love. Her smooth belly grazed the ground. Her burdened hips made waves. Outside, at the base of a dogwood, the fox was caught in a steel-jawed trap. The grass was green, and the sky was blue.
Morgan Day is a fiction and architecture writer. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Ecotone Magazine, Gulf Coast, and Squawk Back.
