My wife drowsily offers, “It’s just the cat.”
I respond, now fully awake, “It can’t be. Cricket’s been dead for a month. You’re still half asleep.”
But she was already getting out of bed, her salmon colored gown slowly disconnecting from beneath our sheets as she slips her face through the crack in the bedroom door.
I flick on the night lamp, then click it twice more to switch to full luminescence though it stings my eyes.
She pulls her head back into the room and turns about. Her face completely slack. Her eyes stare towards me, but not at mine. As if I am a million miles distant. She says dully, “They have green tongues.”
While I still puzzle over her words the lamp pops and the bulb goes dark. Her form is different in the after-effects of the waning glow. My eyes can’t re-adjust to the darkness.
A clunk sounds in the garage: like something large had collapsed or fallen over.
“Honey?” I inquire, half whisper, half speaking.
I get up, ignore my slippers and hustle to the door. The lights in the hallway don’t work, but I gingerly make my way to the stairs and towards the garage.
Where is my wife?
My mind is sharp. I return to the bedroom to get my pistol. The gun box numbers beep as I complete the combination. The revolver handle is oily and I leave the gun box door open.
I’m almost to the garage again. The living room lights don’t work either.
“Honey?” Louder this time.
The garage door creaks. The light inside works.
The freezer has fallen over. Boxes of frozen meat and bags of frozen produce have burst on the floor.
White worms with supple but stout legs protrude like tentacles from the various food containers. They have unfrozen, crawling from the boxes and are now everywhere on the cement.
My own voice inside my head tells me, “It is not good to touch them.”
My wife’s voice says, “They will grow into black abominations beneath the earth. We must let them seep into the ground. It is right and true to do this.”
Startled, I look up. She is wrinkly; old; upside down; disrobed. She floats in the air, slowly drifting up at an angle towards the upside down hanging mountain bikes. She isn’t smiling.
She floats towards me. As she does so, her face becomes right side up somehow. By the time her body has crossed to me, her face is black with decay, eye sockets only half filled with their pallid yellow globs. She brings one hand down and carefully, slowly removes her lips as if they were band-aids. Her jaw is still slack such that a fetor of rot seeps freely past the lipless, gumless teeth.
Almost without thinking I raise and fire. The report rings in my ears. A black hole is in her neck. Slowly a black goop slides out, more like a gelatin of organs than blood that slap onto the floor. The white worms love it. They bathe in it.
Her jaw almost grins.
I know that I need to burn them. They will get outside and seep into the mud of the yard. If they got bigger under the earth, it would only be a matter of time until the end of the world.
The ring on my finger feels heavy now. Do I still love her? I loved her every other day of our marriage. When she was vomiting and gross and ill. To me, the idea of love is a red and pink ray of power that swirls around our hearts. It binds us with a long cord of flashing energy. When we kiss it glows. When we make love it glows hotter. Sometimes it has the strength of a twister and tears up everything in our lives. And then we have to pick up the pieces and remake our lives. But even then, it’s always there, tugging at us to stay together.
I can feel it tugging now. I can still love her. If the worms make a cocoon beneath the foundation of our home and then emerge as black abominations so they can end the world, I ought to love her until that end.
“If you really love me, you will touch the white worms,” she says.
I dutifully obey.
