It Begins With the Worms

Chloe Sherill-Howell / V Mag at UVA

It Begins With the Worms

In the cresting of time, the muscles of my pelvic floor relax and I’m in the doctor’s office, speculum inserted, not yet wide. Jamie and I still have pretty sex in the corner of my mind—ugly at the forefront. The doctor swirls the cotton swab clockwise—thumb pulling thigh to part vulva—counter-clockwise—knees parting knees to pull the panties aside. Latex fingers smell like snuffed cigs, and smoke curls from between them as she parts me open.

Have you ever had little worms inside you? It’s healthy to some degree, until they grow and squirm and my body is made a petri dish itching to get outside itself. Should Jamie shrink himself into a microscopic worm, would he feast himself on my insides until he grows and squirms and my body is bursting with little Jamies inside of me? 

When the orgasm settles I am outside the doctor’s office and inside the bedsheets, spit-slick and sweated out. Outside there’s a funeral procession, or an air raid—sirens slip into somber dirge. 

We conceive life on the deathbed of bombs.

The blood is motherhood and helps the IUD slide in. The doctor tells me this when I ask about our sex in the corner of the room and she slides tobacco-stained fingers between lips. 

When the crescendo builds, I watch Jamie drive us to the river when I am car-less and struck dumb. I wade into the water and it parts around my waist, inebriated. Below the surface, ankles are weak, fondled by sharp rocks that make my body give way and cleave through drunken belly, wet in the blood of the river. Somewhere in the fall, a detonation far off; my pulse. In the body, salmon plays until pink-blushed. I watch them copulate, generations of worms outside of me. 

Jamie and I eat roe in the evening, the ripe masses of eggs popping like seawater pockets between tastebuds and the roof of our mouths. I wonder if our molars abort hundreds of salmon atop our teeth, the remnants of roe wading down our throats. 

How much does the smoke abort?

After the orgasm, I am after the doctor’s office, and my stomach cramps with phantom fingers inside internal canal, salmon dragging themselves upstream to their birthplace. Soon, the blood will end there—eight years lost to forced infertility. In my belly, the pomegranate is mother to her seeds, her blood a thing holy. I fear the worth of my womanhood is a thing measured in pain. I know this blood is the currency of my femininity. Jamie feeds me strawberry popping pearls and all I taste is salmon and the sea. 

In the paradigm, a woman is a woman so long as she bleeds. Where does all this blood go then, when the body’s dried up?

Amidst the climax there is nothing but God smoking the cigarette we will light after we finish. Jamie’s grandfather dies of lung cancer and Jamie hopes to die before this pain can see itself through. I hope to live forever inside Jamie’s lungs. Have you ever let something live inside you? Now, we light the cigarette.

Before we have sex, we will eat dinner with the president below the hum of hummers. He will let Jamie eat lamb while I am forcefed salmon eggs. Writing, I discover, is letting Freud out of my body; how can I force him out when he’s already fucked his way in? We’ll ignore that I’ve had this thought—we are prone to intimate asides and the president will begin whispering to Jamie all evening, and avoid speaking to me all my life, anyway. They will pay us $500 to have a baby. We will spend $18,800 minus $500 to have a baby. The hospitals have all crumbled. If it comes down to it, pick me—I will say. If it comes down to it, Jamie’s hands will be tied. For dessert, the president will let Jamie eat the apple. He will eat another lamb. I will be brought a syringe, dripping. The semen tastes bitter down my throat. Have you ever had something alive been forced inside of you?

I am in the doctor’s office at the fall of the orgasm and the diagram of the embryo is pulsating in her hands. It squirms and when it turns it has the face of the president. Pick me—please.

In the water, the salmon scold us for eating their children. We eat our children instead. Salt is flooded with bitter aftertaste.

Amidst the climax, I see the end of the world clouded in smoke and ash and look for Jamie. The bombs are eating our children we were forced to let grow. When I find him, he holds a lamb’s head. We let our little soldiers eat lamb stew and then they die by ration and radioactivity. We have sex on their deathbed. There is nothing alive inside of me. Everywhere there is blood. 

After the climax, after I’ve made the end of the world out of pelvic spasms, I let the doctor insert the speculum in me. She inserts something dead inside. It begins with the worms.