THE WORM 001–010

001: The worm’s pale brown head, like a weathered paper bag, touches the tip of your finger. There is a pinprick, gentle pinch of pain, and then it sets its ugly body to wriggling, expanding the hole by micrometers, biting, twisting, pushing.

002: Your skin opens suddenly, too soon. Like the mouth of a balloon. The worm slides in, biting, the tip of your vein in its tiny mouth. What’s strange is you can feel it; suddenly you are aware of the highway of blood pulsing within you, knowing all terminals.

003: Pulsating, writhing, twisting, biting, the worm slides tenderly into the canal your veins used to inhabit, drinking blood. A pulse of the worm — you wince, like in pain, but there is no pain, just wet sensation — a blood flows back to heart.

004: A choke. You realize you are weeping, scared. A pinch as the worm bites again, chewing off more of your veins, crawling deeper inside. You can feel it’s head almost at your wrist now, inside of you, through your fingertip. You are crying.

005: There is a wetness, and then an uncanny slide as the worm dives deep into your arm, stroking almost to the elbow in one wet push. Your nerves are numbed enough that you can’t pull away. Then the legs begin to form, inside of you, diverting to capillaries.

006: Micromouths emerging from the main trunk of the worm, drinking up your blood, replacing your veins in a lattice of interior worms. A bite at your elbow. A push up to your shoulder, almost to your heart. A whimper escapes your lips through gritted teeth.

007: There are interior teeth, and through tears you know them. Your heart is food, your lungs are food, your intestines are food. Home to worms, some long and slender and others fat like hoses or pipes. Carrying your blood now, pumping and pulsing inside of you.

008: Your heart is a knot now, thrice-woven in wormflesh, a bundle of wet ridged skin that scrapes and slides against itself as it throbs in a cruel bestial facsimile of your previous organ. The capillary creep of worm through flesh completes to your toes.

009: Flames of Acheron seethe and seize inside you. The great tuber of worm that is now your femoral artery turns on its side, gentle hooks of its flesh scraping against the inside of the meat of your thighs. A mouth reaches up from your neck to your head.

010: Teeth crawl inside your face, wet fingers reaching around from the back of your head across your jaw, your forehead, fanning like a hand within your cheeks. Worms surround your brain, a net, a lattice, tensing, squeezing, then —