"Wait. No stop"
She stopped.
Fingers coiled up into her bag. Another hand felt the bone
of her hip.
The hand smoothed over her arms and tentatively moved into
the warmth of her armpit.
“If you feel anything is inappropriate you must nod.”
She stood frozen in obsequious delight. Inside, a wealth of
excitement bubbled and gorged through her system. The hand in her bag groped her keys and shuffled passed the
loose change in there.
The mystery of other people's belongings, the filth of the
fluff of someone else's pockets.
The men moved in to the light.
"Miss, you seem to be carrying A Voucher"
"Really?
This was given to me just now by a taxi driver, foolishly, I didn't
check and assumed it was change"
"Clearly.
I will exchange The Voucher for the experience, in accordance with
legislation”
"Please… I remember the driver's code, perhaps you
would like me to reel it off for you?"
She knew they were not interested in how she obtained The
Voucher, nevertheless, she was keen to extend the conversation before the
unavoidable consequences.
The man removed a pock-machine from his pouch. As he leaned his head in the light, it
appeared dented; the skin over his skull was soft boiled, no hair then
eyebrows. The machine head was placed on the woman's forearm and he pumped the
switch. In an instant, the woman
was wailing horrendously and her right knee had dropped in concert with the
shrill scream. It had removed a
disc of flesh from the horizontal layers of skin, revealing raw tissue in a
perfect circle.
"Voucher will be replaced with experience"
The woman gripped her elbow with her left hand, she had
quietened; gulps of breath punctuated soft whimpers.
A second figure revealed carrying a small foil-topped
plastic container, with the diagonal corporate branding of a pharmaceutical
company. The man popped the foil
with a knife to reveal a strange black worm, moving horribly as if formed from
hot solder; morphing into itself as a continuous flail of liquid. With precision, he scooped the worm
from the plastic and into the woman's wound.
The woman began to nod.
"Oh?
Inappropriate? OK we'll stop. You're done now anyway"
"Did the worm go in?"
"Yes, enjoy the experience!"
The woman scurried out of the room clutching her arm. The
worm had formed a hard black cap across the circular hole in her flesh.
Once home, the changes began to happen. Seated on the chair,
her gaze softened, her head tilted towards the window. Her teeth began to feel
bruised in her gums; her tongue swelled between her bite. Skin around her wound was turning
grey, pulsing gently from the black worm in her skin. Scratching the chair with her fingernails, she waited,
surrendering to the worm's will.
"Squeak.
I'm inside you, I'm the worm inside your arm, releasing chemicals of
experience into your body."
Her tongue began furiously rubbing the roof of her mouth.
Pump went experience; rushing up her central nervous system grappling with
memory cells and liquidating into her brain. Tubes of phantom food memories
collected in her gullet and slipped into her stomach. Leg muscles twitched spasmodically, implying months of
imagined journeys. Emotions splurged over her, at once, attacking her frontal
lobe. With the lack of grace that comes with complete sensory assault, she
stiffened in her chair; her fingers became brittle poised claws and her left
leg cocked away from her body.
Half an hour passed, she was mumbling incoherently, her eyes
flicking left to right.
"Ah! I see you have spent the Experience Voucher I
purchased for you for your birthday. Ho! Ho!" Her husband had returned home from work, and was watching
his grey wife squirming from her stiffness. Her eyes could fix on him by this point; she formed a smile
through the grimace of the worm's muscular contractions. "I can see you must be nearly
done... I'll just wait and you can tell me all about it"
Gradually, florid pools of colour returned to her skin and
her frame became looser, returning to a normal pose.
"Wonderful!" The word passed lightly out of her
skull. "What a wonderful
experience, thank you so much"
The black worm had returned to its original shape and the
teat of its head was searching to the best direction to move in. Slowly now,
the worm shifted clumsily over the skin, down her arm and fell onto the
floor. The husband moved
stealthily towards it and crushed it under his black semi-patent loafer.
“So, has it given you something to talk about?”
“Yes, the worm decided I could have all the experiences we
anticipated, the cream of happiness and the belching crux of dilemma and pain.”
“Amen!” The husband’s eyes revealed their whiteness and as
he thrust his right arm into the air, his suit folded between his neck and
shoulder. “Happy Birthday, my
love! Now we can get to know each
other all over again.”
With that, a tickle of sorrow wriggled in the woman’s brain,
and a small pump twitched the base of her spine. She looked down to the black
stain at her feet then to the black loafer of her husband, then spoke:
“Experience is a worm, coating the wheels of my mechanisms, burrowing through
the logic of my decisions.
The worm is dead and I am left with visceral traces of imagined glories
and filth.”
The husband knelt next to her, holding her hand, “Look
how interesting you’ve become!
Tell me everything! Drench me in opinions!”
The woman softened her gaze once more and looked back toward
the dead worm.
The ideas ruptured inside her brain and tweaked neurones
into giving him word-sounds.
“Pump pump” she mouthed, “pump, pump…”
