Worms
Manuel López Ramírez Years later, when spilling his guts beneath the bathroom lights, he remembered the day he had met her.
(That little white house with black metal fences and fresh-smelling gardens extended into infinity. The sky had been gray.)
Now it was all yellow. Through the tiny window in the corner of the room. In his nails and eyes and skin and walls and lights. Twirling and whirling around him, up and down, then inside and out. In the toilet bowl too,
pouring out of his insides, though he couldn’t recall the last time he had eaten.
(Could it have been that day? The day her spit-like hair had not moved in the wind. It had decided to grow heavy—viscous. She had too.)
And now viscous was his vomit, and his loins too. Gummy worms? He
had stopped going to the store for anything but liquor. Maybe they had been a gift. But then again, who would?
(He had given her nothing. Not a dress, nor a shirt, nor a sock. Not a house, nor a chair, nor a book. Not a toy, nor a lollipop, nor a smile.
Those nothings had propelled her everywhere she had ever been. They supported the foundations of her perfect little house, the one she had built out of the pieces of her frustrated hopes and dreams.)
Nothing was now his. On his floor. A deep surface. A flat forever he
wished he could dive into, taking on his true form. One of those crawlers that slither through the grainy darkness of the below. Worms eat each
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