Monday, February 28, 2022

The Wormwood House

We learned from the visiting doctor how to live with infection and spreading decay.

He’d been to the neighboring township before he arrived at our blighted deep-woods lodge.

He saw through mother’s fearful lies to the violent wants of the creatures inside us.

The incisions he made in our skin resembled the cuts in the walls father first hacked to get at the worms.

We’d found them after our herb gardens had failed that summer and we’d withdrawn to the lodge.

Suspicion of an invasion from within can make a place no longer home.

Even so, the doctor’s caring curiosity led him to stay days longer,

tending to our afflictions, with no care for himself.

Maybe a healer can sense the sickness growing only in others, even as it silently consumes him.

I dreamt that the doctor had died and decayed of our infection long before he came to us.

I overheard him whisper of me to his recorder:

“The daughter’s worms make her skin tremble under my touch.”

I took the doctor out at night to see the owls seize scurrying things, and I watched his joyful eyes.

I began to care, then worry for him, told him to leave the woods, to escape becoming one of us.

But in our worm-infection, soon, he at last discovered what he had long sought: a death-eating cure.

Exploring one another’s bodies beneath my sheets,

he explained his search to cure himself, by this infection.

So keenly and desperately did his eyes shine as he told of hunting parasites across the county,

before finding us.

I confessed what he’d told me to father, who despite his infirmity,

burned with fury and took down the axe.

Confronted, the doctor pretended ignorance of the true nature of the creatures consuming us.

Father’s skin burst, streaming fluid,

and mother, also awoken, stretched her fingers through walls, howling.

Deftly, I struck the doctor on the head and dragged him away from danger, into the cellar.

I padlocked us both in, leaving the lodge to my changing parents.

Down there, we listened to the worms.

The doctor teaches me now, as we grow into one thing, about the song in our splintering bones.