The Worm in Every Heart

Janice turned, abruptly—a bad move, considering how you didn’t ever want her full attention on you, not more than you could help. Best just to stay background noise, an optical illusion: The amazing vanishing kid, briefly glimpsed from room to room. Because backtalk inevitably set Janice thinking of stove burners set on one, or pepper rubbed in the nostrils—enough to hurt, bad, yet too little to leave a (permanent) mark.

“Seems to me there’s been a bit too much nothing been said around here lately,” Janice said. “Seems to me, somebody might want to keep that in mind.” Pause. “Well?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

The exchange woke another surf-curl wave of memory, washing her right on back to the moment at hand—homeroom, Mr. Wang, her poem. The impossibility of movement, without flashing her shame to the room at large. Her breakfast placemat’s pattern swum briefly before her eyes, just for a second: A laminated rose-garden under improbably blue skies. Here and there, wherever the lines blurred, faces peeped out—pale and wizened features, ginseng death-masks, leering back up at her like tubers left to dry.

Thinking: Yes. Yes, Mr. Wang. Yes . . .

. . . Mom.

Her tiny store of delaying tactics worn through at last, she swallowed hard and felt the vise inside her throat snap shut—tight, and hot, and dry. Jenny’s clique were snickering openly now; the rest of the class just leaned forward, mouths slack in anticipation of tears. Nothing quite as amusing as a post-pubertal monster hemmed in by pre-teens, after all: Face stretched and straining, eyes aflutter while a grown man impatiently panned for public apologies.

And: Oh yes, you’re so right, I’m so sorry sir. Like anybody but him really gave a shit.

She stared down at her own feet, the one knee visible through a rip in her jeans, scabby from crouching in the back yard—head bent, intent, waiting for monk’s-hood to flourish. Then looked up again to find herself suddenly risen, blood-spotted ass flapping free in the wind, face-to-surprised-face with Wang himself.

“Ask her,” she meant to say, giving a pert flip of the head towards Jenny—but the words came out in a scream, and took her desk with them. A general flurry ensued: Much ducking, the desk hitting the nearest window dead centre, with a concussive thump. Cracks rayed.

By the time Wang had uncrouched himself, she was already gone.

* * *

So who knows?

It is well-fed.

And once it has tasted blood,

Who knows

What seeds this thing may sow?

But when the door closes this time,

I won’t look back. Won’t check

To see how little time it took

For me to be erased.

No longer plead my case

Or tear my hair,

That black engine behind your stare

Pulling me away into darkness

:

I’m nothing now but air.

Not even fit to disappear.

Two rats stuck together at the sewer-grate’s mouth: Carcinogens sprayed right and left as they thrashed together, squealing. She sat watching on the far bank, her fresh-washed jeans clammy against her thighs, burning with pollution. A stream of waste cut the Ravine’s heart in two uneven halves, like a diseased aorta; here it shrank to a mere grey trickle over stones. A doll’s face stared up at her from the nearest tangle of weeds—one eye gone, the other washed blind by the current.