Little Green Worms Part 1

My intention was to write an exquisite, precise, highly-calibrated account of the time I arrived at a therapy appointment covered with little green worms. It was to be written in the 1st person with little parenthetical flourishes and jokes. It would build to a breathless climax and end with an ironic punchline. 

But almost everything I wrote, I discarded. 

This is all that’s left. 

What’s the point of writing something unrecognizable? Something so insular it exists only in the mind of the creator? The writer must convey. Madness is a paintbrush striking against the empty atmosphere. Describe the air in front of the subject, not the subject itself. 

It’s a window, boy. Just look outside. You’ve trapped yourself like a rabid animal. Other people’s dreams bombard you with image artillery. With poems written on the tips of poison darts. 

There is a stoop-shouldered man in Amsterdam who has compiled a roster and every name on his list is missing and lost. He imprisons them in the dank oubliette of his memory. He is unmoved by the circumstances of their lives. He refuses to translate their screams. 

If I want to tell you something I must utilize the language you have previously approved. I have to obey and spell it out for you. With vowels you will recognize. Translate my own wounded screams. My voice communicates through airless strangulation. The choking gasp of an epiphany smothered under a plastic Walmart bag. 

Groping toward the final millisecond of my doomed childhood.

Wanna watch me die? Okay, here. Now what? You’ve learned what my end looks like. Great. Bravo. Bully for you. We’re both still dying.

Feel the hot hunches of grass that cluster around my headstone. My pen name chiseled in polished marble: Here Lies Hank Artemis Christopher Kirton—Beloved only by himself. 

That’s correct. My initials are HACK. And I remain unloved.

Rigor mortis will make your muscles contract too, same as mine. I have nothing to add to the equation. It ain’t glamorous at the bottom of a whiskey glass.

And yet, sip, sip, sip.

Piss, piss, piss.

Sip, sip sip.

In out in out. All of life is IN and OUT. Bullets and ballistic missiles are both erect dicks that bring death and destruction. Size only matters when you’re calculating casualties. Syphilitic gunstocks. Stab straight into the wound and make more killers and victims. Fill the world with enough tragedy and misery to make God come. 

Then run from his Holy Jism because it burns like napalm.

I am a motorcycle careening around a vertical circular loop. Turn the key and watch me pee. Dizziness begets clarity. Thoughts become gumdrops. Life is an upside down blur.

Here baby, lemme show you. Gametes and sausages. Your Commanding Officer bleeds in your bed. Tangles of ruined red sheets. Hang `em on your proud self-important American flagpole so they can dry and flap and turn brown. Starched by ichor. Dim-minded patriotic brutes will gather around the bloody flag like ants around a discarded tampon. 

And salute. They are only saluting themselves. Just ants on a tampon.

My portrait. Your banner. Explain yourself in terms cockroaches can grasp and they will carry that lack of understanding back to their shadowy camp under the oven. Infect their dark insect society with the truth of their delayed oblivion. The truth spreads like creamy peanut butter over an infected leg. Peel back the black gangrenous skin to reveal the whimsical runes tattooed directly into the bone like demonic scrimshaw. Surely, you can understand that. Nerves burn. So do words.

Oh? You can’t see it? Gee, what a surprise. 

Neither can I. 

I’ll cave in your insensible head with an obtuse blunt object until you black out. There is a chalk outline waiting in your future.

That’s my Art.

The sublime aesthetic of a chalk outline at a crime scene. 

Everyone deserves a turn to be surrounded.

But don’t let the detectives in.

Someday I too will wear a toe-tag. So will my conniving neighbor.

I hereby accuse my neighbor of using pernicious, mathematical incantations against me. The light in the bathroom fluctuates when I urinate. My belt loops have become so narrow as to be virtually useless and there’s some kind of black ectoplasmic discharge leaking from my keyholes. This is not a coincidence. My neighbor is a witch. As soon as I work up the courage, I will confront her with surgical tools recommended by the Malleus Maleficarum, the Medieval handbook of witch persecution. It’s merely a matter of pest control. Like bedbugs biting your head from the pillow. Investigating the warm moist tunnels in a resting human face. I will Cotton Mather her evil Satan-sucking ass. I will trace an outline around her unholy corpse. Feed her meat to the fleas in that dusty apartment of hers. 

Suicide prevention only delays the inevitable.  

But first I have to get ready for my appointment. Put on some clothes. This damn belt. For a moment I consider keeping my appointment wearing only my underpants, but then I decide to improvise a belt with a length of yellow extension cord. It makes me look insane. Perfect for a therapy appointment. Besides, my testicles tend to spill out of my shorts. That might look a little too crazy. Arrest-warrant crazy. I don’t want to be accused of indecent exposure. It would spoil the surprise.

Besides, these paragraphs are indecent exposure enough. You lucky reader. See me. Hear me. Blow me.

I take the bus. The other passengers notice me without seeing me. My thoughts emit from my mind like breadcrumbs falling from a choking, clogged vacuum hose. My ideas are crumbs and they explode from my mind like fireworks, raining on everything like tiny baked hail. Small and stale and yet still edible. 

I had a friend named Eddie who slept on a bed of saltines. He died with a razor blade on his tongue. I miss him sometimes. When he went fishing he brought a Mr. Microphone and lured the bass and trout to the lakeshore with white-hot Pentecostal sermons. He screamed the fish to their deaths with the Word of the Lord. He was magnetic. His righteous holy voice was the bait AND the hook. 

Then he’d pick up the flapping, gasping fish and drop them in his black plastic bucket. He enjoyed a succulent fish feast every Friday. Eddie never owned a fishing pole in his life. He was above common, pedestrian angling. Lures and flies and impaled earthworms? Never. Not for Eddie. He fished with charisma. Like Jesus Christ himself.

The bus comes to a sudden stop and after several anxious minutes it eases slowly forward, directed past an accident by a waving, barrel-chested policeman who looks disappointed with his duty. He’d rather smash skulls with his neanderthal nightstick. Shoot the innocent in the back to keep the law-abiding citizens frightened and in line. 

Police brutality is like Viagra. 

The car crash happened on my side of the bus so I get a good look at the death festival. A man is hanging out of a shattered windshield and his blood trickles like spaghetti sauce across the hood of the car, dripping down and then collecting again in a red puddle on the asphalt.

A woman lay splayed beside a fire hydrant, her face masked with blood, her blond hair dyed with fresh wet red. She looks like she drowned in marinara. Her legs have been violently fractured in several directions. The splintered bones poke through like cherry blossoms. There are no more cartwheels in her future. Even if by some miracle she survives, dancing for her is dead forever. 

As it should be. God frowns on human movement done solely for pleasure. That isn’t why He created us. We all have important suffering to attend to. Christ on the Cross resonates with spittle-flecked, cum-stained dummies like snuff films and scat porn.

I hear a woman behind me gasp. 

A male voice says, “Oh jeez. That looks really bad!”

I finger the chalk in my pocket. 

This is my big chance.

I stand up and pull the cord to ring the bell. The driver says, “I can’t stop here buddy! It’s the scene of an accident! Just sit tight for now!” 

“But I need to get off here,” I tell him. “I have the chalk.”

“Sorry, bud. No can do. Just wait till we get a little further ahead and I’ll let you off then.”

I return to my seat, dejected. This small humiliation will not stand. I begin plotting my revenge. My next chalk outline will encompass the busdriver. I will do him in blue.

I carry a glass knife for protection. I will make my point clear. I will do harm.

When he eventually releases me from the vehicle, I start walking toward the building that rakes in a fortune from desperate, broken minds that they never fix. The bottom line is a wire garrote running across a mountain range of exposed throats. 

The trees above are raining life upon me but I don’t notice.

I notice everything. Except that. It’s my one crucial blind spot. It will cause my assasination someday I hope. 

When I arrive outside the building I admire the chipped bricks and the solid gray foundation. I don’t want to go in without drinking whiskey first. I do not have any whiskey on my person. My extremities twitch with electric pins and needles of subverted peace. And you don’t understand that. Nobody does. Nobody can. 

Meanwhile, stupid, oblivious me, there is activity all over my unwashed clothes. Green activity, tiny activity. Activity that brings chagrin. That makes dead men weep. I still don’t see it. Poor me, oh woe. Shut up. I will enact suitable revenge. Against myself. 

Just see. Just wait. Just wait and see and flip the switch on your own circuitous route that ends in Hell. Hell is a concept by which we measure our discomfort with others. 

The building smells like death. It reeks of rot. People with no idea they’re dead shamble in the hall, scraping against the wall and shedding skin all over the colorful hallucinations that stain the carpet. Ghastly ghosts and cloaked poachers killing elephants in their pajamas. 

I won’t say it. This is not the appropriate place for punchlines. I must adhere to the decorum of the office. 

But it’s too late. I’ve already broken it. I’m here, I’m queer, and I finally see I am crawling with small green caterpillars fresh from the nest. They are squirming all over me. Hatchlings. Tiny. Delicate. They are in my shirt pockets. They’re in my hair. They wriggle on my shoulders like larval epaulettes. Drill sergeant drill. Wiggle and twitch like a taser-hit victim. These fucking worms are groping blindly in an unfamiliar world. Trying hard to survive in their fear and confusion. They struggle, following blind, unthinking instincts like Papal Decrees embedded within them.   

My therapist is a cunt. Most of them are and I’ve had plenty. He tells me to go back outside and brush off the worms and then come back for my session. 

Okay, I tell him. 

I leave the office and walk outside and never return. I keep the caterpillars. I bring them home like little pets. 

Someday they will have wings. They will become beautiful. Then they will fly away to look for food and a safe place to lay more eggs. Because that’s what they’re programmed to do. 

Merely.