Worms Part I
Page 1
When he saw them the first time he couldn’t believe how ugly they were. With their beady eyes and squiggly bodies, they looked just like some demented 5-year olds’ doodles. Wrapped tight in their white cocoons, they kept squirming pointlessly until feeding time then fell asleep abruptly with their potbellies facing down and the follicles that all doctors call “hair” ruffled and disorderly. In their little green cots trapped in glass they looked just like exhibits at one of those “goo” museums.
He just couldn’t believe that after all this hassle he got to a place where he was faced with his worst fear. He was disgusted and positively sickened by the fact that the “oh, so great” Memorial Hospital was only short of nursing staff in the “Incubator Room”. One more look at the underdeveloped children with their black wrinkled hands and suffering faces with the tubes and wires attached and he’d have vomited on the spot. He thought that kids from Somalia looked better than these balls of wrinkles with their verucas and edemas, bruises and suffocation marks.
You see one of those Pulitzer pictures with children crouched bones askew waiting for the vultures to fly away with them. They all know there’s no hope left for them. But, no, these deformed brats will have to fight for their scrawny bodies and will have to face criticism and will be prone to diseases and spoiled and cooed over for years now. They’ll never recover. Yet you keep them and cradle them and feed them out of the palm of your hands and furnish yourself with hope and the Providence will provide.
Oh, the silkworms turn into butterflies and spin their silken threads, the worms die happily to help fishermen catch their prey, the babies die leaving holes in peoples’ hearts and wounds that will never close. Yet we feel like we should watch babies fighting and slowly dying behind glass bells and strap them to machines that automatically feed them, and hang on to futile hopes.
Its worse at nighttime when some of them wake up flailing limbs crazily crying and waking everyone up with their screeches.
Well, we’ll see where they end up. This is the exact place where the Rip Van Winkle old men were playing their little bowling game, a heath out of time. Barbut for the Gods, gambling with stakes of young, frail lives.
Photo of the "incubator baby" exhibition at the 1904 World Fair
Labels: Worms don't dance
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