The Worm

Flash Fiction #1

Blue track stripes glint and bounce off the ambience like ricocheting bullets made of light. He swings around in the ergonomic swivel chair in a series of frantic revolutions, markings of a man burdened with too much memory and mission, too bothered by the bad and the ugly to focus on the good. There's a TV droning on, playing an old show from golden time when things were black and white, and as the man stares into it, he misses it like an in-yun past life, sensing the sultry tug of its red fate-strands.

Oh Buster, you jolly good dog, you bootstrapping young lad, you who made the populus laugh for pretty pinching pennies because you did so for the art of it. The man in the blue track-striped suit is watching Buster's classic scene: the newly-weds invite a basketful of friends over on a devious Friday the thirteenth, and that day being what it is, summons an omen in the form of a hurricane that threatens to sweep the lopsided home up into that eternal sky. The man in the suit watches the house spin aimlessly on meagre foundations, watches the panels fly off, the wood splinter, the windows crack, the people hovel. He watches them as they try desperately to war against it, but they are all kites abeyant to the whims of the hurricane, subjects to the acts of God, that prissy, awful king. On any other night, he'd have laughed at them, or perhaps even taken pity the way a pastor or a nun does. But tonight wears a different shade, reeking of sick.

Out there, beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows that put the naked, steaming city out there for all to see, the man does not smile. He doesn't give it with that famous million-dollar bone-breaking soul-eating giggle. He remembers feeling like this before, recalling vague hazes of a strange bloody-marred vision quest that ended with a practical gag so funny he couldn't stop chortling even if he tried. This is old skin that he's wearing, and that should be comforting. But instead, it itches.

Indigos swallow and clash amidst the red and oranges, primary colors intermingling in chromatic sex, while taxis glide and revel in the rain, doors and tapered windows eroded by time, and by this city. He's different. He should be different. He shouldn't be like them, and yet here he sits, white knuckle on white jaw, unable to feel or sense or think of anything except the parasite swimming in his belly.

The man faces the window once again, and this time there is a reflection, but it isn't of him. It is of that prehistoric worm fornicating and fomenting where his heart should be. The worm's dressed like a sad boy with the cute overalls and the button nose and the curly mushroom hair and the tattered life.

The worm says nothing. It stays sitting in that wind-up box, waiting to spring out and eat his heart and ruin everything. The man closes his eyes, praying that it be wished away, for all things to be washed away by the heavy rain in this city. He tunes out the vaudeville repertory and listens to it drone and drone until it seems further away, until all there is is nostalgia, that which makes things safe and tried.

But then he opens his eyes to see the worm splay out from between his twenty-four ribbed prison, unnamed and unbowed, squirming scared and septic in the window's reflection. It’s enough to turn anyone’s frown upside down.