A new year is upon us! And with that comes this story about a new you. But, in typical underside fashion, maybe not the way you envision. Get to working on those resolutions before something like this happens!
Worms
by Joseph Evergreen
I woke up in a hospital with a wife I’d never met.
“Maybe you can’t remember, but you’re the new Ethan,” Jen told me.
“What happened to the old Ethan?” I asked.
She didn’t look comfortable explaining it to me, but she did. “Well, he got in trouble. So we had the doctors make a copy of Ethan, but with his worst parts removed.”
“Is the old Ethan still around?”
Jen shook her head, saddened. “We don’t need the old you anymore.”
She took me to her house. Our house. My memories were returning, only vaguely. The place wasn’t familiar to me, yet I found myself navigating it as if I’d lived there. The kitchen across from the living room. The silverware in the drawer beside the dishwasher, with forks on the left, spoons in the middle, knives on the right. Mugs above the toaster, and I knew which mug the old Ethan had used most. My truck stood in the driveway. I think I treasured that truck.
Jen put me to bed soon enough. I brushed my teeth with my toothbrush. The face in the mirror was mine, but it wasn’t. I felt as if I was somebody else. I got in bed. Ethan always slept on the left side. Jen stayed out of the bedroom, doing laundry in front of a show I knew as one of her favorites. As I sat in bed, I tried to summon Ethan’s memories.
I could remember every time that I’d hurt her, though the memories were more like dreams. I remembered the bloody knuckles, the holes in the wall. I remembered the belt. I remembered the frying pan. I remembered the golf club best of all. That had been the last time.
That was the old Ethan, though. I wasn’t that man. I was the new Ethan, with the worst parts removed.
When Monday came around, I went to work. Ethan worked as a PE teacher at the middle school up the street. I drove there without hesitation, as though I’d driven there a thousand times. The staff greeted me, with only a little enthusiasm. Apparently I had been out for three weeks. Jen had told everybody that I was getting a surgery.
I went to the gym for first period, and I told the kids to run laps, the way we always began. I knew the names of all the kids. They didn’t like me, and I understood why. Ethan always shouted and jeered, taunting them when they underperformed. Ethan particularly picked on Rebecca. He didn’t like young girls who knew they were pretty.
The kids were afraid of me. Yet the teaching came naturally. Eerily naturally. Mondays were for dodgeball. Kids were supposed to like dodgeball, but they weren’t having fun. They were disappointed that Ethan had come back, and their substitute teacher was gone.
When I got home, Jen was doing the dishes. She was always diligent about chores. Ethan used to yell at her if she wasn’t. I watched her scrubbing a plate from the doorway before I announced myself. I was in love with this woman, but I sensed that I was only in love with her because I was supposed to be.
I wanted to be a good husband to her, yet I didn’t know who I was. I came up behind her, and I lifted my hand to rub her shoulder.
She cringed away from my raised hand. “Oh. I’m sorry,” Jen said. “You startled me.”
I couldn’t sleep that night. We were lying in bed together. I didn’t want to touch her. “I don’t belong in this world,” I told her.
She was still awake. “Don’t be ridiculous. You do belong in this world. You’re wanted here. More than most.”
I wanted to cry. “I’m a bad person.”
“You’re not a bad person. You’re not that man.”
“I can remember everything.”
“You’re not a bad person,” Jen insisted.
She fell asleep some time later. I didn’t. I was awake for hours. I felt sick. I wished that I weren’t in this body. I wished that I had been born someone else.
I felt so sick that I got out of bed. I went to the bathroom, standing over the sink, my palms pressed hard into the counter. I was nauseous.
I found myself retching. I coughed, and a worm came out.
It can’t have been a real worm, but it looked just like one. A pink, wriggling thing had come out of me and landed in the sink. It was moving, twitching.
I was frightened. The worm was supposed to be in my body. It was a part of me. I couldn’t understand why, but I needed to put it back. Cringing and grimacing, but obedient, I picked the worm out of the sink. I put it in my mouth and forced myself to swallow. It tasted like raw meat.
Breakfast took some time the next morning. My stomach was still unsettled. Jen didn’t seem to suspect that anything was amiss.
I had to ask her, “Where’s the real Ethan?”
She looked at me. “Don’t say it like that. You’re real too.” She reached across the table to grasp my hand in hers. “You’re the Ethan that I fell in love with, before it all went wrong.”
I had always been good at sensing when Jen was avoiding a question. “But where is he?” I asked again.
Her hand remained where it was, though I saw her pulling away with her eyes. “You don’t remember?”
I remembered the golf club. I remembered a courtroom. I remembered shouting at the judge, losing control of myself. But these things hadn’t happened to me. They’d happened to someone else. “He went to prison,” I said aloud. I hadn’t dared to touch those memories directly before.
“That’s right. He was a… a bad person.” Jen stumbled over the words. “That’s why they made you for me. You’re him, but with the worst parts removed.”
I didn’t respond to her. What could I say? I was dwelling on the other Ethan. He was alive, locked away in prison for many years. One day he would be released. What would happen then?
Strangely, I wanted to meet myself, to visit the prison. It was a foolish thought, and I disregarded it.
I asked Jen, “Did the doctors who made me say anything to you about worms?”
She paled. “Worms? That shouldn’t be. If you’re having worms, that would mean that your body is no good. We’d have to make a whole new you. Why are you asking this?”
Hurriedly, I said, “It was just something I heard the doctors mention, before we left the hospital.”
Jen crossed her arms. “Good. Because you need to tell me right away if you’ve got worms.”
At the middle school, I decided that I didn’t want the kids to be afraid of me. I wanted to be a kind PE teacher. I wanted to be fun. This only made the kids confused. They were disconcerted by my smiles and my laughter. I tried everything. I even complimented Rebecca on her form while they were playing basketball, but she sneered at me like I’d insulted her.
I hated myself, I realized. They didn’t know that I was a good person. They thought that I was bad. Wasn’t I bad? Was I not Ethan?
As I watched the kids play basketball, I imagined myself swinging a golf club, swinging hard with these hands that would never quite feel like mine. That nauseous feeling came back.
The moment that first period ended, I went rushing to the bathroom. And it happened again. I was retching and gasping. A wriggling pink worm fell out of my mouth, into the sink. I retched again. Two more worms. And then another. Four pink worms were squirming in the sink.
They were supposed to be in my body. I couldn’t lose them. I had to put them back.
But that was crazy. I couldn’t do this again. I scooped up the worms with my hand and dropped them into the trashcan.
Except no, no, no, I needed those worms! They were a part of me! They were a part of me! I had to put them back. I had to. I dug through the trash frantically, finding them again. I was trembling all over, feeling sicker than before, but I put those worms in my mouth, and I swallowed them, and it felt right. I felt complete again.
I was falling apart. Something in this body that I inhabited was coming unraveled. I didn’t know how to stop it. I wouldn’t let them replace me. I wouldn’t.
The nauseous feeling never went away. I suffered through the rest of the school day, but I think I masked it well. I went home to Jen, to my wife, and I barely touched my dinner. I told her that I simply had no appetite.
In the middle of the night, she woke me, shaking me.
“What?” I asked her.
“I had a nightmare,” Jen said.
“Oh,” I said. I could imagine the memories that would give her nightmares.
She shook my arm again. “Can you hold me?”
She shouldn’t have wanted to be held by Ethan. But I was not Ethan. I held her in my arms, arms big enough to crush her little body. Yet she felt safe there. How could that be? I couldn’t understand it. This was all wrong.
After working at school the next day, I didn’t go straight home. I went to the prison on the edge of the city, because I had to meet the man that I was. I didn’t tell Jen I was going. Was this something that a bad person would do? I didn’t know.
I only lost six worms that day. But I put them back. I put them back.
When I got to the prison, I told them my name, and the name of the man that I was here to visit. The guard at the front desk wasn’t confused. In fact, he seemed as if he understood exactly what was going on.
“Are you sure this is wise?” he asked me.
“I want to see him,” was all that I said in response.
Two guards were summoned to take me to him. They didn’t bring me to the visitor’s room. “We can’t take him out of his cell,” one of the guards said as an explanation. “He causes trouble.”
It was no ordinary cell, either. They kept Ethan in a room at the far back of the prison, away from the others. His cell was windowless, save a small rectangle on his door for him to speak through. The guard slid the rectangle open.
“Ethan. You have a visitor.”
A face appeared in that small rectangle. I could only see the upper half, the window was so small, but I knew that the face was mine.
I stared at myself. “Hello,” I said.
“No,” Ethan said. He recoiled. “No! She replaced me? Jen replaced me?”
I wanted to say yes, but I couldn’t open my mouth. The sight of this man had stunned me.
“No!” he shouted. “That bitch!”
He tore his face away from the window and began pacing his little cell. I couldn’t see him easily, but I heard him kicking. It sounded as if he was punching the walls, too.
“I’m gonna kill her!” I saw myself roaring. “I’m gonna kill her!”
The guard took my arm. “I warned you. He causes trouble.”
There was no chance to say anything to myself, to the old me. Ethan had flown into a rage, cursing Jen’s name, cursing my existence. It was useless to try speaking with this animal.
When I came home to my wife, I said nothing of my trip to the prison. She asked me no questions about getting back late, which was a relief, because I hadn’t yet discovered if Ethan was a good liar or not. I felt wrong, sitting in this house, at this kitchen table, knowing that I wore the face of a monster.
I didn’t eat my dinner. I couldn’t have a bite. Jen asked me what was wrong. I told her that I was sick, because it would be preposterous trying to convince her otherwise. I knew the nausea showed on my face.
Jen was concerned, if only mildly, as I hurried to the bathroom.
Over the sink, I kept coughing, kept retching. More worms. More worms. I could feel my body withering as they came out of me, like a teddy bear losing its stuffing. Between gags and coughs, I dug my hands into the pink worms and forced them back into my mouth. I tried to swallow. My throat was raw. As soon as they were down, I was coughing them up again.
“I didn’t want to hurt her,” I told the tear-streaked face in the mirror. “I didn’t want to.” But I remembered it all too well.
I went on retching over the sink.
Meet the author:
Joseph Evergreen is a novelist primarily writing science fiction and speculative fiction for both children and adults. His most recent encounter with the underside was a homeless man offering him milk duds.
If you liked this, come back for more:
Good, disturbing, and sad!
Excellent story. Sci-fi at its best!