Content Warning: This material is not suitable for minors. Do not read it if you are one.
A toilet is a terrible place to die and my coffin will be full of shit. But, I first noticed the helminths when I was a young boy on the upper bunk. My foreskin hadn’t yet been able to peel back entirely and I found erections painful. The first of them came out without skin or eyelids, I imagined they’d form cocoons and their wings would erupt from their shells, becoming abhorrent flies transmitting their unbearable pestilence all over our world, their buzzing a cacophonous cloud vibrating through the nerves of the living. At such a young age, I had no idea what they wanted from me.
It’s been years since I’ve been afflicted with them, and now my furniture is covered in dust. They started to come out of me after a cousin and his friend held me down and showed me video tapes. I won’t recount them. I first learned of these tiny worms on a playground of wood chips, before then they didn’t have a name for me, only a conjuring. When the first squeezed out, I gasped. First its head forced its way from my urethra, its eyes gazing into the world for its primordial birth, then the rest of its little white body whereupon it fell onto my bed sheets and tried to crawl away from me. At first, they were a curiosity. I’d collect them, and every summoning was novelty. Months and years later, they’d form colonies of their own, within my sheets, inside my walls, under my carpet, inside my soul, and sometimes, inside of others. Nothing I knew of their feeding.
Long after they fed on everything around me, in every crevice, and long after they sapped what they could from others who encountered them through me, I noticed them first on the skin of my ribcage. I became frantic. I created more, and more, for as long as I could. Eventually, their colonies turned to hives. I can only describe them as great, glistening mounds of flesh, with bones, teeth, and blood in every direction with no apparent anatomical order, their growth itself an insult to the living. After long enough, the hives would grow breasts and their own sets of genitals that more of the helminths would slowly trickle out of, to create more of their kind.
They spread over the rest of my body first as patches, beginning from my ribs and slowly consuming the rest of my torso and back, until the upper half of my body resembled a tree covered in thick, wooden knots all over. Then, my legs beginning around my groin, parts of my pubic hair would have bald spots with more of the parasites prying their way out of me. I’ve done everything to try to hold them inside of my body, some of the wounds are covered in tape, others covered in thick industrial adhesives, and the worst of them I attempted to burn shut. My body itself has become a great hive, and from my flesh they will spread until they’ve taken the world, or taken the world from me. As I sit here disintegrating in my bathroom with my hands over my face, I can feel them slithering out of my eye sockets against my palms. I don’t know why they chose me. I am the pest.