Gut Worms
by Cody Walzel
part 1
The fecal larvae confirmed it: Rolando had a worm. Slum clinics dealt with the parasites on a daily basis but, catch one as a medical professional, and you were “gross”; you’d done something unclean, violated some moral-social contract by eating filth or frequenting unsanitized places. Unfortunately, Rolando knew there was some truth to this, given his floor-mattress lifestyle.
Working bottom-rung at a rathole slum clinic was depressing. Understaffed and overburdened. The ward was forever packed with stressed co-workers and miserable patients in rickety beds. He held the sample jar of his excrement overhead and muscled his way to the fecal rinse tub.
His shift doctor stepped up beside him, eyeing the jar. “Someone’s got it bad. Is the patient still here?”“No he... uh, she left.”
“Good.” The doctor scowled as if this infected poop was somehow worse than any other poop.
Signs posted everywhere reminded staff to scrub their hands and avoid surfaces that came in contact with the contaminated. Rolando tried not to touch anything.
The doctor gestured to a nearby patient. “Her parasite’s too big. Just make her comfortable.”
“Can’t we just patch up her intestinal walls with SkinLyke?”
“Not on her insurance. She’s already too far along. Suck it up and help ease the poor woman’s suffering.”
“But I’ve never... I don’t know if I can... pull the plug.”
“Then you should’ve gone to a better school or gotten a better job. Just administer the analgesic, and I’ll turn the knob.”
Rolando wondered why slum doctors looked down on the nurses for working in the same shoddy hospitals they did. He attached the drug and put a hand on the writhing woman. “Hang in there. The pain will pass.”
The woman gave him a baleful look and flung her bedpan at Rolando’s face. The doctor cranked the knob. The patient’s eyes grew distant. Rolando put his face in his hands.
When he looked up again, the doctor was eyeing his crotch. “Are you wearing the same unwashed scrubs as yesterday?”
Rolando examined the yellow smear. “No,” he lied.
“Then what? You ate mustard for breakfast?”
“No, I uh, got paint on them on the subway.” He wasn’t sure why he was making it worse by lying. He’d worn these pants for at least ten shifts without a wash and couldn’t even remember when he’d last eaten mustard.
“Don’t bring filth into my ward again, mustard pants.”
Rolando exited to polluted blocks that merged into megastructures with streets carving through them like arteries of an ant colony. No fresh air. Farty vents everywhere. Electricity didn’t run in the neighborhood during graveyard shifts, so the precious few hours Rolando was allowed to exist without working were lit by trashcan fires and neon signs hooked to noisy generators.
He hid his face as he stopped by a drug store and bought cosmetics to cover his infection symptoms. Then he holed up in an alley and applied concealer to rashes and purple eye bags. He combed over his patchy hair and chewed gum to hide his grinding teeth.
* * *
The pungent odor of soiled work scrubs woke him up at night. Rolando could have purchased a hamper, but a feeling of self-loathing made him leave his worn clothing sitting out. But not tonight. Tonight, despite the worm throbbing inside him, he rolled his overstuffed laundry down five flights of stairs.
He stared into tumbling laundry and considered his options. Clinics were out. It would get back to his work inside a week, and he’d be released for poor hygiene. Between washing machines, he spotted one of those shady ads for “Discreet Worm Removal.” He followed the impulse two hours across town to an unfamiliar slum.
* * *
“Nothing to worry about. They’re harmless if you get them in time.”
“I know, I’m a nurse.”
“A nurse with a worm...” Dr. Sibley whistled, judgmental. Rolando found this unfair, considering the circumstances. This “doctor” wore a headlamp and cleaned scalpels in the dark.
“Why are all the lights off in here?”
“I just like to keep a tight focus on what I’m looking at.”
That seemed like a lie. Rolando shifted, uncomfortable. Dr. Sibley swabbed Rolando’s potbelly with alcohol and injected local anesthetic.
“Aren’t you going to give me an IV?”
Dr. Sibley ignored him. Even at Rolando’s substandard clinic they put extraction patients under and set up a surgery screen. Here, it was just a spotlight on the impending gore.
Rolando’s eyes adjusted to the dark room. There were fetus models, a cabinet of speculums, a lubricant dispenser, and a human egg-cell growth chart. “Excuse me, why are we in a gynecologist’s office?”
“Lay back.” Dr. Sibley pressed Rolando’s intestines, and the worm pressed back. “They’re more valuable if you let them grow a while.”
“Valuable?” Rolando sat up.
“Just kidding around.”
“You are a surgeon, right?”
“Well, I am a doctor. A dentist, actually.”
The ad hadn’t mentioned that. Dr. Sibley leaned Rolando back and pressed a blade to his belly. The numbing balm worked an eighth of an inch deep before Rolando felt the scalpel ripping skin. “No, stop!”
“Easy.” The dentist pressed gauze to the wound. “Your worm isn’t dangerous yet. You can wait a while, if you want. Let’s sew you up.”
Lights came on in the next room, and a janitor wheeled his cart past the window on the door. Dr. Sibley forced Rolando to his feet and towards an emergency exit.
“Ow, hey, what’s the problem?” Sibley asked.
The beefy dentist yanked Rolando down a stairwell and into a rain-corroded alley. Rolando’s wound tore more on the way down. Dr. Sibley snapped off his bloody gloves and lit a cigarette. Rolando examined Sibley’s cheap costume lab coat, his gold tooth, his slicked-back hair.
“That’s not how you do a worm removal.”
“Oh, right, you’re a doctor.”
“Nurse.”
“Whatever.”
Rolando watched him savoring the cigarette. What kind of dentist was this?
“You probably see a lot of parasites, yourself, these days?” Sibley said.
No kidding, there’s a plague on, Rolando thought. “Quite a bit, yeah.”
“Ever hear about those mega-rich guys that eat them as a delicacy?”
“What?!”
“Yeah, they buy them at auction, on the black market.”
“I didn’t even know that was real.”
“Do people use those contacts to buy and eat intestinal worms?”
“Some do.”
“Why? Is that even safe?”
“The worms can’t hurt you when they’re dead and arranged into... sushi or whatever. As to the why, I think it started as a status thing. But the flavor is supposedly unbelievable, so a foodie culture developed around them.”
This weasel knows a lot about this. Rolando pegged Sibley as a criminal or some type of pervert.
“So were you going to sell my worm?”
Dr. Sibley showed his palms. “Hey, buddy, I’m on your side. But you could make some decent cash if you get your hands on fresh worms.”
“Fresh worms?”
“Find a way to get your patients’ parasites to me.”
“I’m in medicine to help people, not to sell stolen biohazards out of a trench coat.”
“Don’t get sanctimonious. It’d help slow the outbreak. Find people with symptoms and get them the enterotomy before their parasite spreads. It’s the same as what you do at work, except you catch people in time.”
There was precious little off-work time left, and two hours of train transfers before sleep.
“Thanks anyway,” Rolando said. He waded away through the knee-deep trash, waving this fever dream goodbye.
* * *
On payday, his nursing school debts were docked from his check. Rolando could only afford the minimum, and after years of payment, the loans were larger than when he’d started. His rent steadily increased. His wages stayed the same. He lived one bad month from the street.
Rolando sat home in his curtained stall, sipping another liquid dinner from the supplement dispenser. His abdomen throbbed. Floormates’ devices beeped and buzzed around him. Loneliness settled in. Rolando fingered the cut Sibley had made and thought of his family.
When Rolando was ten, his grandpa gave his stepbrother Travis vintage coins from some ancient past when physical currency still existed. Travis tried cramming them into the credit slot of a vending machine.
Rolando worked his hands to the bone in a fulfillment warehouse and had money saved. He bought a dozen Nutrisucks and traded them to Travis for a coin. Travis drank the Nutrisucks within a week and told Rolando’s rageaholic stepfather that Rolando’s coin had been stolen.
His stepdad gave Rolando a choice between scrubbing the filth-crusted communal bathrooms or twenty bare-cheeked belt lashings. Rolando chose the belt. It broke his skin, but Rolando didn’t make a sound.
Later, he saw Travis digging and led him to the softest dirt: a needlebug colony growing alongside the boiler. Rolando walked away, counting down in his head. The screams began on cue. By the time the adults got his stepbrother hosed off, Travis was too traumatized to speak. That night, Rolando slipped down to Travis’s bunk and took his coin back.
His mother told him, “Work hard and things will work out.” But even back then, it sounded like propaganda designed to trick the mud people into accepting their fate. He’d studied medicine and prayed to the greater good. But it turns our life sometimes requires unapologetic plunder.
Removing people’s worms might get him a life sentence, but he’d at least save a few lives. He could either earn his way out of this hell or work honestly until his body gave out and he ended up on the streets next to thieving, diseased strangers who threw violent fits in the night. Life had led him to another sadness tunnel. Maybe there was light — and even human connection — on the other side.
Rolando dressed his cut and called Sibley. He’d consider the job provided he, Rolando, handled all future surgeries and he met worm-buyers beforehand.
* * *
Security escorted Rolando up the skyscraper to a restaurant in the heavens. He’d never been up this far. Never seen open sky. The air was thin and crisp, the glass floor suspended over a bottomless chasm. The expansive light hurt his head and made him dizzy. Rich, ageless patrons wore silky, fitted robes and stared at Rolando in disgust. To them, he looked like an animal wearing a sack quilted from filth.
The buyer flaunted his status by doing what he wanted: smoking despite the signs, dressing like an eccentric pirate and stroking some endangered lizard sitting on the table.
“Hi, Doc.”
“I’m a nurse.”
“Whatever. You’re Doc, and I’m Mr. Privilege, got it?” His commanding voice made Rolando’s worm bulge, and Privilege seemed to sense it. “Got a little friend there?”
Rolando feared Privilege would gut him right there while the Maitre D’ applauded. He changed the subject. “I guess I want to know your opinion on the outbreak.”
Privilege laughed. “Wouldn’t know. But as for the worms, I wish I’d never tasted the damn things, their explosive, life-devouring flavor.”
This guy’s a nut, Rolando thought.
Privilege registered Rolando’s shock. “Don’t knock ’em till you try ’em, Doc. Imagine your whole body swimming through a pool of tender filet mignon. Every bite pulls you deeper. You lose yourself and come to, hours later, sweaty and satisfied in some new location. You’ll ruin your life over it, which is what I’m trying to avoid. Worms are becoming hard to come by due to the... judgmental attitudes surrounding them.”
“That’s because they’re a deadly parasite—”
“Annnd, not contagious when cooked and eaten.”
“Yeah, but people are dying by the tens of millions.”
“So, they’d die whether or not I eat worms. The planet is pissed off, Doc. It’s not gonna stop until there’s less of us. But hell, eating the damn things might actually slow the outbreak. If the proper market developed. You’d treat the infected and be well compensated for your time.”
Rolando mused to himself: So, this is it: my chance to get ahead means selling my soul to some cruel sky-tyrant between courses of waiter abuse and open-mouthed chewing.
“Doc, think of it this way. People like me will get their worms one way or another. The options only get darker from here.”
“They do?”
“Plan B is voluntary incubation. People paid to grow the worms inside them until ripe.”
“But they’d be contagious. It would worsen the spread.”
“That’s why Plan A is best. You don’t even want to know Plan C.”
* * *
The train home was crowded. Everywhere was crowded. Seats had been removed decades ago, but Rolando was lucky and got crushed against the window as they passed through the wealthy district. No electricity rationing here. If anything, they seemed to have too much. Everything was slick, sterile, and unnaturally bright. Irritatingly bright.
Ads played from the sides of buildings, on road signs, storefronts, car windows, phones, eyeglasses, tabletops, dangling from little screens on earrings, projected onto food and mounted to the backs of people in debt.
Even here, people were stacked in towers so high they blotted out the sky. Nowhere felt like outdoors, and it went on forever. Just a zillion repetitions of dark slums conserving power for glowing hubs, wrapping end-to-end around the entire planet. Humanity deserved worms. Someone had to stop them.
No, that was just elitist propaganda getting in his head. People living now didn’t deserve this. If anyone deserved worms, it was the generations of humans before them that had just kept thoughtlessly paving and ocean-dumping and ejaculating more humans than the planet could support.
Rolando’s head hurt from thinking and the bright-ass lights. “Rich Town” sucked, too. Friggin’ light poisoning. Finally, the train tunneled into another darkened slum.
* * *
Copyright © 2025 by Cody Walzel
