Brainworms

Samir Sirk Morató

‘aaneurrrrrrr (edit)’ by Dusty Ray. Used with permission. Dusty’s prints and originals are available here, on Etsy.

It should have ended when you killed yourself. You aren't special. Just another faggot who vaporized the roof of your mouth because you were too sick and scared to be alive.

Yet nothing ended. You blinked and found yourself sitting on clean sheets and clean pillows boxed in by clean, whole walls and a clean, whole roof. You got dressed. You left your room. You greeted your brother in the kitchen while sunshine scorched the crater in your skull. You ate cereal with bone shards raining from your mouth and gray matter dripping onto your shirt. Your brother scratched his hip and talked about pigeons and electric bills, as if everything were the same. He looked through you while you dug cornflakes out of your destroyed palate.

Maybe it is all the same, you told yourself. The apocalypse happens every day. Why should my brother be shocked?

So even as your body grew, you remained unchanged, dull and cyclical, suspended in perma-rot until you were twenty-seven years old.

Then the bugs came. 

🐛

The first centipede shows while you’re making a student loan payment. You never wanted to attend university and you don’t want to pay this loan, so the distraction of the centipede is welcome. It crawls from beneath the wallpaper and settles above the coffee maker. You stare at it. North Dakota is no place for a centipede. It is a chain of coppery segments thrumming on marigold legs. It’s as fat as a sausage.

This loan is bleeding you. That isn’t as interesting as this centipede’s bulky head. Its gleaming jaws. Does it want your toast? Maybe it wants the apricot jam. You avoided jam and pudding until brain chunks stopped tumbling into your throat. The squish was too similar. You’ve reclaimed jelly-textured foods recently.

The centipede raises its front end off the wall. It hovers, legs twitching, sniffing the way noseless beasts do. Its beady gaze finds you. Belatedly, you remember centipedes aren’t herbivores. That’s millipedes. You stare at each other.

Hello, the centipede says.

It has a customer service voice. At once, you fear that you’ve been rude. You cough and shuffle your papers. You look at the centipede over your glasses as if you’ve just noticed it, then say Are you an accountant? 

No, the centipede says.

Then don’t talk to me. I’m paying important bills.

You pretend to add numbers until the centipede retreats into the wallpaper.

🐛

When you think about it, you’ve only ever seen house centipedes before. Your aunt’s house in Florida was full of them. While you and your brother visited her a decade ago, she squashed a multitude of them with brooms, slippers, and books. They were nothing like the centipede in your house now: they were small, and feathery, and they always seemed so afraid before they were pulped. Your aunt crushed them flat and used a scraper to peel them off the floor.

Jesus, your brother once muttered. What did the centipedes ever do to her? Officiate her second divorce?

Since you knew your brother wanted attention, since your head was physically whole, you laughed. Then your aunt returned to settle on the couch again, grumbling, and you continued poring over photos of family you didn’t know in places you’d never seen. They might as well have been insects in amber. Your brother was in the bathroom when you pointed at a little girl in an Easter dress and asked who she was.

One of your cousins, your aunt said. She killed herself before you could meet her. She turned the page. ¡Mira! There’s our old pet hen.

You didn’t get to ask more questions. Your aunt spotted another centipede to crush. She rose from the couch, huffing, and seized a rolled newspaper. You watched her chase it around the mantle for a laborious minute. Your brother rejoined you right as she crushed it. The thwack echoed around the living room. Only your aunt’s wheezing was louder. 

Your brother elbowed you. Made some joke that didn’t matter. When you didn’t respond, his grin faded. He pressed closer to you as your aunt scraped another carcass off the floor.

From that point on you were always withdrawn.

🐛

Sir. There’s a big hole in your mouth.

You are standing paralyzed in the yogurt aisle with nothing but crackers in your basket when the centipede oozes out from between bottles of kefir. Before you can respond, another one joins. It hangs from the shelf like an obscene tongue.

Yes, you say. That’s what a throat is. Good job.

No. The second centipede rustles. The other hole.

Your tongue probes the broken skylight of your mouth. Halogen grocery lighting drips into your skull. It tastes of battery acid. A toothless senior pushes into your space to read a yogurt label. She’s breathing into your armpit. You grab a yogurt to look occupied. You don’t want it. You can’t remember if you like it.

My holes are none of your business, you say.

The way the centipedes twist forward turns your gut. Their politeness makes it worse. There’s a wellspring of vileness seething beneath that chitin. You don’t want to see it unfiltered. You’re scared you’ll empathize.

We need help, they say, carefully taking turns to avoid interrupting each other. You seem like the right person for that. You have an open mind.

My god! You wave your grocery list at them. It’s darkened with meaningless scribbles. Hopefully centipedes cannot read. First of all, that was uncalled for. Second of all, I’m busy. Leave me be.

You walk lap after lap around the grocery store, sweating, swiping random items into your basket, before you’re sure the centipedes are gone. At check-out, you barely register you’ve spent $30 on nothing that can make a meal. That much is normal.

🐛

Your favorite ex-coworker liked centipedes, far more than he liked his job or you, and because even after you killed yourself you wanted to fuck him, you lied to him and said you liked them too. The last and only time you two hooked up, he invited you to his place to see his centipede terrarium. You navigated a matrix of dirt roads to a dilapidated cabin thirty minutes outside town without a word to your then-roommates about where you were going.

You’ve blacked out the arrival, blacked out anything that happened between the front door and the basement beyond your ex-coworker locking the door behind you, but even brainless, you remember the house: its counters encrusted in rotting food, its carpet blistering on the stairs, its space heaters with frayed extension cords, its dusty windows and dim lights.

I have three roommates, your ex-coworker said, as if that explained everything. But they’re gone for a while.

Then he guided you to a corner of the basement stacked with heating pads, bags of peat moss, and magazines. While you stood ankle-deep in chip bags and bong ash, your coworker polished a 20 gallon tank full of plants and driftwood while waxing lyrical about the precision of centipede-keeping: the necessity of humidity, of heat, of low light. You glimpsed none of his precious pets. 

After the terrarium tour, you and your ex-coworker had sex. He didn’t do what you asked. It was disappointing, not violating. Nor was it surprising. Even before you killed yourself, men treated you with the unkindness you deserved. By now you just wanted to pretend you were whole. You stared at the ceiling as the encounter dragged on, half-expecting to see escaped centipedes watching from above. At the end you dimly wondered if you’d need to pressure wash your skull clean. The extra hole in your mouth made it no longer idiot-proof.

I bet no one’s gone as deep in you as I have. Your ex-coworker smirked.

They sure haven’t, you said.

You drove home then found he had blocked your number before you could block his. Neither of you talked to the other again.

Later, you realized he could have killed you, or something close. Unlike you, plenty of ashamed men turned their hands and guns on the men they were seeing instead of themselves. No one knew where you were. No one but your brother would have cared.

That didn’t scare you at all.

🐛

The fifth centipede is bigger than the previous ones. It’s thicker than your wrist. Longer than your forearm. Its legs are redder, its exoskeleton darker. It dangles from a lampshade almost overhead as you text your brother. Unlike the centipedes murmuring to each other on the wall, it is silent; unless you look up, only its antennae are visible. They thread the top of your vision like loose eyelashes. Sometimes you hear armor crackle. Sometimes you don’t.

You don’t know what you fear more: the centipede’s proximity to your gaping, empty head, or the fact it might comment on your inability to text.

Chillbumps prickle your back. Sweat dampens your chest. Wet fingerprints streak your phone as you rewrite your message for the eighth time. Nothing reads right. Your brother texted weeks ago. You don’t remember that much time passing. He’s ceased sending anything but ‘Hi’ and ‘Hope ur okay.’ His unanswered texts are a desolate, crawling string on the left side of the screen. 

There’s a breeze overhead. A movement that brushes your remaining scalp. You drop your phone then squirm out of your seat. Floor squeaks beneath your sneakers as you skid to a stop away from the lamp. The largest centipede watches.

We must talk, she says.

Irritation edges her voice.

There’s nothing to talk about. You are smaller as your fingers twist together; your voice is higher. You wish you’d had a funeral.

The Between Spaces are becoming inhospitable, all the centipedes say.

I don’t follow.

Because you don’t listen. The Between Spaces are becoming drier and colder. That’s bad for us. The largest centipede speaks louder. Her antennae probe your general direction.

How does that relate to me?

Because you’re here too, a centipede says, and much wetter and warmer.

They look at you with expectation. Their gazes skitter to your open skull. You force down your saltine puke so it doesn’t geyser through your sinuses and cranium. You don’t want to house polite predators. You don’t want to be one. 

I can’t help, you say.

You flee before you can process their reply.

🐛

It’s strange your cousin looked nothing like you. You’re the same person. If not that, then kin beyond blood. The singular important difference between you isn’t time, or gender, or language, or space. It’s that everyone knows your cousin is gone. You hope that stupid bitch knows how lucky she is.

You hope she’s not conscious enough to realize she’s lucky.

🐛

That night, you huddle in bed to watch videos of centipedes. The type and length of videos and centipedes alike don’t matter. You glut yourself on clips of them gliding through terrariums, documentary snippets of them mating, PBS segments about them laying eggs in rotten logs, and elementary school science presentations. Your laptop squirms with as many legs as your walls. Your mouth and eyes are dry when you watch a video of one killing a mouse.

It’s forty-two seconds. That’s too long. The centipede bites into the mouse’s back then clings on while the mouse thrashes in terror. Eventually, the mouse spasms. It sinks to the ground. Its eyes remain open as it dies. There’s no sign of the scientists who put both animals into that tub besides informative captions and the video itself. You shut your laptop harder than you intended.

If the centipedes decide to force themselves into your head, will you be able to do anything? What if they bite you? Would their toxin do anything against someone unalive? You lick your lips. You’ve never considered them using force. Their customer service voices prevented you from it. You use that voice too. You’ve never taken action against customers, though you’ve wanted to.

The threat of being fired leashes you. The centipedes, however, don’t have jobs beyond being centipedes. What’s the worst that could happen to them if they lose their restraint? 

That thought sends you skittering out of your room.

You dig through your bathroom supplies until you find a shower cap. You jerk it on, then secure it with a sweatband for good measure. It inflates when you exhale; it deflates when you inhale, settling against your skull. The centipede coterie watches you stumble back into your lamp-lit room. You crawl into bed. Thankfully, they don’t comment on it.

Sweet dreams. A centipede clacks its pincers. Are you turning that light off?

Abso-fucking-lutely not.

Lamplight morphs your eyelids into red, veiny tundras. A flimsy layer of plastic won’t do anything against a determined centipede. By the time you’ve recited that to yourself for several minutes, ‘won’t’ has turned to ‘might not.’ That’s enough to lull you to sleep.

With luck, it’ll just take another night before ‘might not’ turns into something delusional and pleasant.

🐛

When you and your brother encountered suicide footage online, you were fifteen. He was eleven. You huddled around your desktop in the dark, joking, sure someone in your sophomore group chat had linked a prank, until the journalist in the 240p video put a pistol in his mouth. The blood spray was too bright for movies; the spectators’ screams were too confused. It was too real to be real.

Your brother hit pause when the video began replaying. Not you. You both sat there, scorched by the glow of the computer, for what felt like years. You had both laughed in surprise at the gunshot. Now it felt like you were criminals. Eventually, your brother spoke first.

“That looked like an awful way to go,” he said.

He was looking at you with hope and fear. You stared at the pixelated thumbnail of the man’s blood and said, “Yeah, it did.”

You saw your brother’s pinched shoulders. You didn’t hug him. You tabbed back to the group chat. Everyone was responding to the video with laughs or disbelief. The classmate who’d sent it had @’d you. ‘hope u liked that treat, fag,’ they’d said. You closed out immediately. Maybe your brother saw it. You never know if he did. All you could think of was how fast the journalist died. How the singular visible comment on the video said, “He was being investigated… they knew he was going to do that.” The urge to watch it again unsettled you more than watching it. 

Your brother would cry if he registered that, and comforting him would make everything real, so you navigated back to home videos of skateboard accidents and grannies falling. You never talked about it again.

🐛

You can’t wash your sheets because then you need to make your bed and if you make your bed then you must grocery shop and if you grocery shop you must cook and to cook you must clean dishes to eat and cook with and if you do that you must read your mail which means reading your bills and if you do that you must call your bank but there’s only bad news there and you cannot handle that because you are exhausted and because you’re exhausted you cannot wash your sheets.

You handle this million-segmented conundrum by doing nothing.

With all due respect, sir, a centipede says from your dresser, you should pay your bills. It will become quite cold if you don’t.

Please shut up.

You cocoon yourself in gritty sheets. You watch the mouse death video on loop. The twenty-seven or so centipedes converge in whorls on your ceiling. Even with headphones on, you hear the raspy, polite clatter of their voices. When the largest centipede is absent, the others talk like they’re at an HOA meeting. It’s difficult not to picture them in little housewife dresses.

If your pillow wasn’t almost corking the back of your skull you would not be comfortable with all of them hanging above you.

After the mouse video replays four more times, you hear a raspy cough. Then another. And another. You yank your headphones out and look up. What?

After a short discussion, I’d like to say that we’ve changed our minds on the importance of paying bills.

…why?

The centipede above you preens its antennae. You stare at it.

Don’t worry about it, another centipede says.

It must be noon, if not later, yet with the blinds drawn and lights off it’s impossible to tell. Hundreds of legs feather the ceiling shadows. The centipedes bask in the plaster ripples. You imagine unlit nights with them. You imagine them holding whispered conferences about being cold while the largest centipede slithers into the dark seams of the house and waits.

Where’s Big Bertha? you say. She’s been gone for a day.

Don’t worry about it. The centipede that answers is perfectly pleasant.

You get out of bed, yank the blinds open, and begin gathering your sheets.

🐛

You wonder when that six year old girl in the photograph knew she was dead. When she realized what was coming. Was she your age? Was she older? You wonder if the doctor put a stethoscope to your cousin’s chest when she was born and heard nothing but writhing centipedes and maggots. You picture him shaking his head and telling himself, No, no, I’ve misheard, before passing that rotten bundle to her parents.

Maybe the moment your cousin died is documented in another photograph. You’ll never know. It’s possible there aren’t any more photos of her.

It’s a different case for you. Nowadays, you avoid letting anyone take photos of you. It’s pointless to document a corpse. But old photos are different. They’re plentiful. Sometimes, via an archive retrieval site, you browse a website your aunt created for family photos. You scroll past broken HTML lines and low res gifs of dancing animals to see images of you and your brother:

you holding him in his hospital blanket, both of you ambling around in snowsuits, both of you awkward and acne-faced. Both of you as raw, pixelated lumps that barely clock as people. You zoom in hoping to spot signs of blood spray or centipedes. You can recognize truth in 240p. The turning point must be cataloged somewhere. It’s written into your bloodline. Why not here?

There’s never anything.

🐛

The errands keep coming. So do the centipedes. 

There’s so much mundanity you choke on it. You register a month has passed when your brother leaves a voicemail. You listen to it in your bathroom. By then, your walls are nothing but centipedes. Your toothpaste tube is empty; your shower is unclean. Your world squirms.

“I’m so fucking sick of you!” 

Your brother’s sobbing used to have hiccups. 

“Ever since high school you’ve acted like you murdered or raped someone and I’m getting sent to death row with you if you talk to me. It’s like you’re in front of me but not here. You’re such a fucking loser! The worst you’ve ever done is shoplift! You’re a shitsucking asshole with something wrong in your head, but that isn’t a crime! Please call me. Please call me. I need to know you’re alive. I’m scared you’re not.”

Fix your priorities. The largest centipede has returned from her hiatus swollen with eggs. She taps her feet on the mirror. She eclipses your reflection. When your brother requests a welfare check the police may remove you, or kill you. I don’t want the hassle.

She sounds an inch away from complaining about bus tickets. The laugh that explodes out of you echoes tenfold in your skull. Your brother is somewhere losing his mind and you’ve already lost yours, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. An ugly bolus of sound builds in your throat. 

The centipedes wait in silence until you’re done crying.

I shouldn't be here. You grip the sink. Snot greases your tongue. Your face is swollen, your skin wet. I have no brain! I didn't make plans! I quit at eighteen. What do you want from me? What do you expect?

You don’t know if you’re pleading with the voicemail or the centipedes. The latter don’t care about subtleties. Everything seethes.

You’re the sole being who can handle this, the largest centipede says, so you will. That’s what we expect. We must fill space. You have it.

How unfair. How true. A centipede falls onto the doorknob. The lock clicks.

Life is a series of unavoidable tasks, isn’t it? 

Always.

Your knees tremble as the hundreds of centipedes begin rearing. Reaching inwards. They’re politely debating who will get what curve of your skull. Were you dead, you’d bear none of this; you’re alive, so you must. No tantrum alleviates the reality of decision. Nothing short of nonexistence will stop entropy. 

Millions of legs wriggle. Thousands of pincers clack. Their movement wafts into your head. Sweat dribbles into your skull and mixes with snot. Shapes roil inside the black diamonds checkering your floor. Inside the trash. Inside the drains. The shower curtain pulses. It never used to be black. You don’t know when you lost track of its color. You don’t know when you lost track of the centipedes.

There were five of you for a long time, you say. Can’t just five of you come in?

There aren’t five of us now, the centipedes say.

Yes. I know.

For the first time since you put the gun in your mouth you are afraid. Another apocalypse closes in. You kneel to be farther away from the ceiling. It’s the action of a child. You have never prepared to withstand real pain or consequences—you never wanted death; you only ever wanted to escape—but unlike your cousin, you didn’t succeed. You have dues to pay.  Blood leaks from your nose.

Please. You clasp your hands. Please. 

The centipedes are twisting together. Dripping down in segmented, writhing ropes.

What will your brother say when you call? What does it mean when you don’t want to stay while no longer wanting to leave? Pincers grip your hair. Your broken skull. Your lips. Your jaw tips open without you. Your skin, aflame with grasping feet, crawls. Everything hurts. Antennae probe your tongue.

I can’t bear all of you.

That’s unfortunate. A whisper scratches your sinuses. I think you will. I even think you’ll start living.

And then, again, the world falls in.

🧠🪱