Manuel López Ramírez, Worms Joseph Hong, Six Shots, Data Structures, and

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

other, don’t they? Yes. That’s what he was gushing out. He could suddenly remember picking them out of the crackled concrete floor. What would she think if she could see him?

(Her eyes were just like his. And that of her children too. She had brought them out that day, as if they had been trophies. A sparkling girl and a bright-faced boy. Before the wooden door the three of them were like mirrors, the ones that make people appear taller, shorter, fatter, thinner. Each a better version of him. Reflections of what could have been.)

What was it like to raise children? He was too old to wonder. He had sensed the cuts and creases carve themselves onto his flesh, then had felt his muscles evaporate. Now, bendy bones and flowy skin prevented him from getting up. He could only sleep and heave. His was not a body to feed children with.

(But it had never been. He himself had made sure of it—hiding it, contorting it, bending it twofold, threefold, fourfold to fit into the tightest corners, where he couldn’t see her and she couldn’t see him. Before that day, he had only met her through dusty windows and cracked wooden doors, her child-body perpetually wrapped in that floral dress her neighbors had made for her. She had become a sort of communal offspring: belonging to all, belonging to none. But that day she had worn solid white and had burst into heavenly flames.)

He started burning up. His throat and his eyes were on fire. His whole body stung and throbbed; his teeth seemed to melt into his mouth. So he immersed his head in the cool lemon waters of the toilet bowl. Refreshing. Then, acrid. Corrosive. The acid toyed with his flesh. The yellow turned red. Yet there he stayed. There was nowhere else to go, only what his stomach had conceived. In his drowned screams, he could hear her words.

(He had heard them softly flicker around his ears for decades. They had started coming to him as soon as she had learned to speak. Sometimes they came from her mother’s furious whispers, echoes of her laments. Sometimes they came from desperate letters she used to write in colored crayons. He had always waved them off, as though they had been flies. Then one day, sitting next to his wife, looking out of the window, he realized what he had done. It came to him like a sign from above. It hadn’t abandoned him since, festering in his stomach and driving his implacable search for her—she who no longer wanted to be found. That day, he had finally heard them come from her own throat. The dust from which I came; you are nothing to me.)

(They had cut through him like razors.)

Now he was ripping himself apart for her. That shimmering Madonna watched over him the way he should have watched over her. She wanted him to compress his limbs, his organs and bones into a single, tube-like mass. She wanted him to jump and disappear into the sewer. She wanted a metamorphosis. And that’s what he would give her.