So Many Worms
A story about revenge beyond life
My flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust; my skin is broken, and become loathsome.
The Book of Job
I wonder if it's true what they say about Spence women: that we are given to black cholers and dedicated from first to last to the exaction of revenge for the slightest offense. It could hardly be true of a whole family full of women. From medieval times to the present, or even deeper back in time, to the ancient world? And back further still, a Spence woman from before there was any Spence family, a little hominid girl grubbing through the savannah seeking vengeance on some other apewoman who'd done her wrong? My ancestress, laden with those bad bad genes of resentment and rage. But a survivor nonetheless. Perhaps there's something in that unholy thirst for revenge come what may that makes one fitter for life in this bad old world of ours. Who can say?
Arguably it didn't do me much good. Here I am, dead, with so many worms crawling over my corpse where it lies unregarded in a wasteground far off the main highway. Worms attached to my liver, worms and maggots partying inside my swollen abdomen, sucking on my eyeballs. All my education, all my learning, come to this, an abandoned hunk of putresence lying in a rank puddle.
While she continues walking among the living. Breathing air, eating, feeling the stretch and pull of her muscles. No justice there. Lover, rival, enemy, killer: she shouldn't be doing any of those things. She should be the one lying in a putrid mass being consumed by worms, while I stretch my legs and sip chardonnay and giggle softly at retribution claimed. There's no justice except what you make yourself, and while it may seem I'm not in a position to do anything about it, I beg to differ.
Because it seems I am a ghost. The 'I' who I was so accustomed to calling 'I', the fleshy muscle-and-guts Orlanda Spence, is no more. Consumed by maggots and worms, etcetera. Boo hoo. But there is another 'I' released by this ordeal, and it's who I am now: the immaterial flame of being. Never used to believe in such as I am, but now I'm here I guess I have no option but to accept that I exist. How does it feel to be an immaterial flame? Like nothing. Not even the heat of a regular cool blue flame. But my rage is still there, so I guess it feels like rage.
For so long after it happened, I hung around my forsaken body, trying to force myself inside so I could make it rise and move again. But I’d been expelled from that place, and there was no way back in. There was ample time to think. If I’d needed a brain with a billion neurons flashing sparks in order to think, then what’s doing the thinking now all those neurons sit unsparking in mouldering goo of my stilled brain? What's doing all my seeing and hearing, if not the eyes and ears now filling with vermiform visitors? How is it that I can see and hear, but not taste, smell or feel any physical sensations?
These and other things I pondered, for I am of a meditative frame of mind when I'm not plotting payback. But there are never any answers.
And here's another one: Who am I talking to now, in my voiceless voice? Who are you? I've decided you’re God, or something like God, the something that perceives and makes me real. If anything, my present experience confirms there's something beyond mere flesh and blood. How could I remain a materialist, when all's said and done, when now I'm immaterial flame? Oh , you know all this speculation is pointless, don't you? You're God, or whatever universal something it is that perceives all. So I guess you’d know the answer. I might find it too, once I'm free of my curse. Once I've had my vengeance, then I can float free and join you, God or whatever the fuck you are. Until then, it's payback time.
Now I can break away from this place, this festering lump and this gloopy puddle that is no more than rainwater and dribbling ooze from my forsaken flesh. Let it go. Goodbye, body of me. It was great being you, despite the many flaws you had, but now I guess I'm on my own. Too bad the worms got you, too bad about your forlorn place under the rain, open to the shame of the sky. But that's on her. That's her doing, leaving you like that. Disrespectful and sloppy. So her.
Drifting, then, over the fields, fallow in late fall, where the odd migrant picks through the stubble for something left behind. Can they see me? No. Have you ever heard of a ghost seen in a potato field in the broad daylight? Can they feel me? There’s a shiver as I pass near them, but it's likely attributed to a sudden chill, a cold breeze stroking over the hills and into their bones. Who's ever heard of a haunting in an empty field in mid-afternoon?
And so it goes... through fields, through woods where foxes and squirrels pause in what they're doing to watch me pass, out onto the highway and on into town. Stormshowers sweep in.
Cars and trucks burst through my immaterial flame but we are weakly interacting, they and I. There’s not even the slighest tug from their metal and plastic, from the bones and flesh of what they transport, as they speed through me, an insubstantial traveler on the road of time.
At the side of the road, a man is changing a flat tire. Jack in place, rolling out the spare, when he of all people sees me. The sun has passed behind a dark stormcloud, all around us is light and dripping with the flickering silver of raindrops, but this patch we're in is darkened by shade. He blanches, drops the spare wheel and backs away. I move on.
I have no interest in fostering dread in some random dude. My passion for vengeance is laser-focussed, not polyvalent, not scattershotted out around the whole of humanity like a single beam of hate diffracted by many prisms. Focussed singularly on my lover, my enemy, my killer. I'm coming for her.
It's sundown when I arrive on campus. Great orange and crimson surges in the savage sky, streaked with broken black stormclouds to the west, as I skim towards the Bio building.
She's there, of course, tinkering in the lab, though she has no real idea of what she's doing. Faking it, just like always. Sylvia Birchwood, PhD. So beautiful, so false. So far out of her depth without my mentoring.
I flit inside her being, feeling her out, probing for the way in to where it might hurt. She pulls on a jacket. There's a chill in the air, apparently, but nothing else to mark my presence.
In vats and jars all the swatches of synthetic skin grown out from the biocultures are failing. She knows she can't make them grow without me, but still she doesn't understand just what she's done. She steps away to answer her phone.
Just to her right I see the control vats, cultures of skin taken from the fresh cadavers of the impoverished dead, samples to act as controls for the culture-grown grafts. Human skin, floating loose, still bearing the fresh bloom of suffering. To be pitied in life, but now to be envied, for in the end those poor ones found rest, and I still haven't.
She speaks into the phone. It’s him, Paul from Astrophysics, her accomplice and co-betrayer. She babbles to him about nothing much: dinner, movie, how work is so so stressful. Of course it is, Sylvia, you haven't got the least idea what you're doing. You lack your wise mentor and friend who you left for dead.
Does her voice as she speaks show any sign of remorse, loss, grief? Not that I can sense. If I push my flickering tongue of flame inside her... oh, inside her - then I sense nothing at all. Maybe she has no flame of her own, no soul. That would explain it. That would explain it all.
Just then I hear her saying "Paul, we shouldn't attend the faculty party with Orlanda still missing. It wouldn't seem right." I'm overwhelmed with fury - coldhearted bitch, she's pretending she doesn't know... to him! - then confusion, then most overwhelming of all, understanding. She really doesn't know.
I swoop my immaterial self right across the lab and into my office - still my office, still just the way I left it. There it is, the note I left, on the desk, untouched. So stupid of me to leave it there, but then again, I was not in my right mind. She hasn't even checked - my research assistant, and still she hasn't checked my papers. More fool me for leaving my last things in such disarray? Or her, for trying to carry on the work without even looking at my notes?
I can't open a sealed envelope, but I remember the note quite well. it was brief and to the point. Desperation should not get in the way of a clear and concise written style.
Sylvia,
By the time you read this, I will be dead. In strictest technical terms, I will have taken my own life, but both you and I know that you murdered me.
Killed me with your betrayal, your indifference, your rejection of me and your preference for him. This is my revenge on you.
If you care to look, you may find my body at the spot in the woods I took you that one time, when you walked away from me and said you couldn't love me that way,
Heartbroken, yours forever, your lover and your victim,
Orlanda
Now I recognize my mistake: I should have killed him first. That way the search for me would inevitably lead to them rifling through the papers on my desk, and then she would have seen the note and suffered double, at the loss of him and of me, and even triple, at the recognition of her own culpability.
As it is, I can only wait around here, in my office, for whatever day she might go through these things on the desk and find this note, and suffer then in her guilt and shame. That’s to say I can still haunt this place, and that alone can be my revenge. But this new plan carries with it incompleteness and uncertainty. Waiting around here, powerlessly watching her succeed at our project despite her manifest incompetence. Then becoming tenured, living with him. Family, happiness... my happiness, stolen from me. Would it be my revenge, in this case, or hers?
I can also dimly foresee a time, not too far in the future, perhaps, when some anonymous cleaner will come in here, clear away all my documents, and shove that still-sealed envelope with all my other files and papers into a black plastic sack, a bodybag of words, to be sent out for incineration. My words will be cremated while my body rots to putrefaction out in some wasteground, on an untravelled country lane beside a rainwater pool fringed with green moss and mold.
This is the end of all, then. A curse and an extinction of that whole long line of ancestresses who burned with frustration and fury, from the first hominid scraping up grubs and swearing wordless retribution to her enemies – to me, without love and without future, in body abandoned and in spirit unseen.
Revenge is merely a worm, gnawing at me inside of my womb, that place which no longer exists and never can again. It gnaws at me now, it’s both my child of rage and her child of unknowing. Worm of my womb, will you never one day emerge to witness vengeance? Will you die sterile on the swabbed floor of a pristine lab, and never see a birthday?
NOTE
This fiction was written in response to a prompt from FICTIONISTAS as follows:
Your protagonist is a person in love who is also a ghost
Your story must include a family curse
Our “bonus” card said “flat tire”
Get your polished story (no longer than 1000 words) on your Substack page.
I’ve gone nearly twice as long as that, but the story kept coming and would not allow itself to be limited to a thousand words. Looks like all my microfiction practice is in vain, and I’ll go as long as the story is telling me to go no matter what. Oh well, if it’s unacceptable because of length, so be it. I still enjoyed writing it and hope you enjoy reading it.
Unique sketch of a spirit. Especially with the first person POV. And worms are always nice.
among your many brilliances, you consistently come up with the most fantastic character names.