By Laura Tobón
Was it a guava worm or a garbage worm? She never managed to tell them apart with certainty, though there was one thing she knew perfectly well: guava worms dissolved between the fingers, as though they did not matter, almost like words impossible to pronounce. Killing them was not disgusting, and they could remain scattered across the tiles until, after some time, they vanished.
Besides, it was a lie that they had no blood, that they were hollow inside. More than once she had heard people say that once removed, no trace of them remained, but she had pulled them out herself and seen blood stain her fingers with glimmers of chitin scales. Sometimes she woke in the middle of the night just to make sure she had taken the trash out and that there were no worms in the kitchen. When the suggestion tormented her sleep, it would not let her rest. She could hear the worms dragging themselves across the floor. She almost never remembered to take out the garbage before going to bed. It was a task reserved for the mornings.
However, toward the end of that spring, a different sound woke her from sleep. Naked, her skin prickling with cold, she walked to the kitchen to check whether she had forgotten to take out the trash. But the noise did not come from there. That night she had taken the garbage out. What she heard came from the hallway of the building. She hated the fourth floor. The building was old and had no elevator; carrying groceries, damp laundry, and black garbage bags up the stairs left her legs trembling. At that hour of the night, the stairwell seemed longer, and the entire building creaked as though it were ill.
She lifted the blind and found weeping and rain outside. The yellow and red flickering of the ambulance lights left her dazed. Beneath the rain came the murmur of neighbors gathered downstairs, awake in the middle of the night, their umbrellas covering their faces and preventing her from distinguishing them. A woman with the voice of a martyr could be heard saying, “Poor old woman.”
Carolina returned to bed and closed her eyes, trying to recover the sleep that had escaped her minutes earlier, but the sound persisted, tangled among suggestion, exhaustion, and the images of the incident. Later, the doorman, always meddlesome, told her it had all happened because of the death of an old woman from the first floor. A paralyzed old woman who loved books and had sewn her mouth shut so as not to utter another word. Her mother tongue had decomposed, and worms had begun slipping out through the openings in her flayed skin. The friend who occasionally came by to help her take out the trash discovered it too late; when she entered the apartment, she found a pestilent odor and the floor covered in moving worms.
Laura Tobón is a writer, poet, and editor born in Medellín, Colombia. She currently lives in New York City, where she studies, writes, and slowly becomes the best version of herself.
Photo by Rafael Cerqueira from Pexels.com
