Black Veins

It must have happened while I was filleting fish. At least, I think that’s when it happened. I honestly can’t remember, but it must’ve come from somewhere, right?

I had cut off the head. It still lay there, looking at me, as I cut the body open lengthwise and pulled out its guts. Then, one cut along the spine and ribcage to separate the meat from the bones. Long, clean cuts. You cannot hesitate. I must’ve held the fish weirdly, that’s what I thought at the time, since I pricked my left thumb on the knife. I drew away my hands immediately. It looked worse than it felt. A red gash around the size of a lentil. Fuck, I thought. I washed it, of course, and bandaged it and put on gloves before resuming, but, still, it was time lost. We were in the middle of our shift, right before peak dinner time. By the time my shift ended, I’d basically forgotten all about it. You really don’t have time to think about small stuff like that in a kitchen, not when it’s this busy.

I took off the band-aid that night and looked at it under the bathroom light. It was an irregular wound, jagged and a bit larger than I had remembered, but I thought nothing of it. I bandaged it again and laid down next to Sarah who was already asleep. She said nothing about it the next morning.

Two days later, it entered my mind again. My thumb hurt. It was my free day, so I woke up late and Sarah was already gone. My finger tip was pulsing, throbbing with pain, as if it had been hit with a hammer. I took another look at it under the fluorescent bathroom lamps. The edge of the wound was darkened. I could see yellowish specks of pus gathering in the flesh. I cleaned it and tried to ignore it as best I could. I went for a run but every step on the hard concrete felt like a tack driven into my thumb. I went home and drew until Sarah came home—that I could do with just my right hand at least.

She told me to go see a doctor. “Nah, it’s just a small cut,” I said. I told her not to worry. “I’ve had infected piercings that hurt worse than this.” She gave me that look—drawn up lower lip and slightly squinted eyes—that she always gave me when I said something she didn’t like. It was her method of bookmarking it for later when she would refer back to it and tell me that ‘I told you so.’

And that was it, I thought. The wound started to heal and after a few days of munching Ibuprofen, I forgot about it. At first, I didn’t make any connection between this and what happened some weeks later.

I thought I must’ve tripped on something. I couldn’t tell you on what, though. Maybe my own feet. Whatever it was, I flung a whole tray of aluminum-wrapped potatoes across the kitchen. Eric, our cook, yelled at me immediately, asking me if I was high and if I wanted to get fired for a workplace violation. I knew Eric swallowed Adderall like some people eat Skittles, so I didn’t really give a shit about him, honestly. He told me to pick up the potatoes and plate them. Some of them were squashed and looked more like hockey pucks. I did it anyway. By the end of the night, I was exhausted. I felt dizzy. I walked home and felt like I was going blind; everything that wasn’t directly illuminated by a streetlight just looked black to me and the lights themselves were so bright they made my head spin. I made it home, still,—you could’ve blindfolded me and dropped me in the Amazon and I would’ve made it back to Sarah—but I collapsed onto our bed without even changing out of my work clothes.

The next morning, Sarah was already gone. The light streaming in between the folds of the curtains burned my eyes, but I was too tired to even get up and close them, so I just turned my face downwards into the mattress and lay like that until I couldn’t breathe anymore. I had to keep the bathroom lights off. In the half-dimness, the rings under my eyes looked even worse than normal and made my head look like a skull. In the kitchen, I found that Sarah had left me breakfast pancakes with a sticky note saying ‘for my hard-working tigress’ next to a drawing of a small kitten. She constantly drew cats on everything, including my forearms when she caught me off-guard. They were cold, so I popped them in the microwave. The ding sound when they were done felt like a punch against the back of my head. I felt seriously hungover. I took one bite and—couldn’t eat them. The dough felt like wet sand in my mouth and the sweetness made me so nauseous that I had to spit out the piece for fear of throwing up. I called in sick that day and lay on the couch till Sarah came home. I don’t even remember if I slept during that time; just laying down made me feel a whole lot better.

When Sarah got home from work she was of course worried about me, but I told her not to. It was probably just food poisoning or a cold coming on. Still, she insisted. She took my temperature—slightly elevated—and gave me more Ibuprofen. She told me to make a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. After I told her yes, she took my face in her hands and looked me deep in the eyes. “Tell me that you’ll make an appointment tomorrow.” I had rarely seen her this sincere. I couldn’t not agree.

* * *

Two days later, I sat in a crammed waiting room downtown. I was the only one wearing a mask; the rest of the people there were just blasting viruses all around the room. Some kid licked the glass of the fish tank in the corner while his mom scrolled on her phone. I got called up. The doctor was an older guy, gray hair and mustache, who called me Mr. Hutchinson at first before looking at my file. I explained my symptoms to him—the dizziness, light sensitivity, headaches, trouble keeping food down. He asked me if I could be pregnant—definitely not—and told me it was probably period-related or maybe some mild food poisoning. Thanks, doc.

I went home and lay down again, just like he’d told me to. Sarah brought me a cup of broth, which I did manage to keep down. She sat down next to me on the couch and began stroking my forehead. I was reminded of when I had broken my arm and she visited me in the hospital, back when we had just started dating. “I think we should sleep separately tonight,” I said to her. “I don’t want you to get sick too.”

She kept on calmly caressing me. “If it’s food poisoning, then I’m probably gonna get it anyway, right? I don’t eat out, except for coffee, and you don’t eat at the restaurant. So you must’ve gotten it from something we both ate.”

“Maybe I didn’t wash my hands correctly. I handle a lot of chicken and fish and whatnot. I could’ve gotten it from that probably. ”

“Baby, from what you tell me you sound like the only person working there who actually washes their hands.” She wasn’t wrong. If Eric were the one prepping chicken, the whole city would have been down with salmonella. She leaned down and kissed me on the cheek. “I’ll try not to wake you when I make breakfast.” With that, she left me alone.

I spent the whole night staring at the ceiling. It’s not that I wasn’t tired; I definitely was. But whenever I closed my eyes, I got restless. It was as if my heart started to beat faster and louder until I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I got up and went into the bathroom. My cheeks were pale and had fallen in a bit, exaggerating the whole skull look. I washed my face. The cold felt like a shock, more like diving head first into the ocean rather than only a handful of water from the sink. The dizziness hit me again, probably from standing up too quickly, so I steadied myself against the edge of the sink, gripping it with both hands, when I saw something move in the corner of my vision. I looked down at my hands. There was nothing unusual about them. Even the cut on my left thumb had healed, only a small spot of smooth pink skin remaining. I thought I had seen something move on my hand. We had a silverfish—or maybe it was always a different one; I’m not good with faces—living in our bathtub. But they don’t crawl around on humans. The always hurry down the drain as soon as you turn on the lights. I made a mental note to tell Sarah that I thought I saw a cockroach and lay back down on the couch.

That night, after I must have drifted off to sleep, I dreamt terribly. In one of the dreams, I was pregnant and giving birth but the baby came out all wrong. I can’t even say how exactly. It looked more like a grub than a human baby—no legs, no arms, just a giant gaping maw where its face should be. The doctor tried to hand it to me but I panicked and tried to get away from it. No one seemed to acknowledge that it wasn’t even human. Right before waking up, I dreamed that Sarah and I were at a restaurant. We ordered pasta and when they brought it, it looked like worms writhing on my plate. I looked up to see Sarah eating hers and it was worms too. That’s when I woke up with terrible stomach cramps and rushed to the bathroom.

It was still in the middle of the night, so I tried not to wake Sarah. I sat on the toilet, sweating, my heart beating so hard, I could feel the blood pounding in my ears. That was when I saw it again. Or saw it for the first time. Or didn’t see it at all. Just a shadow, moving quickly, just out of focus, somewhere along my leg. I chalked it up to my imagination or maybe the bad dreams that I could still hear and see when I closed my eyes. But then, it happened again. A small black dot moving across my thigh, clear as day.

I freaked out, stood up, tried to get away from my own leg somehow. And then it just wasn’t there anymore. From one second to the next it had vanished. My heart began to slow down again, but my brain certainly did not. Do you know that moment in a horror film when they are chased by the killer and they finally make it to safety and all is quiet—too quiet? That is where my mind went. I tried to calm down, to breathe, to think. If there was something stuck in me, whatever it was, if that was what had made me ill, it might harm me even further and I needed to get it out and get it out quickly.

* * *

The episode had completely woken me up, even though it was just 3 AM and I had barely slept. I thought it best to get it over with quickly. Whatever it was might block an artery and give me an embolism or something. I snuck into our bedroom, took out some clothes and put them on in the hallway so as not to wake Sarah. It was completely dark outside. The streetlights in our little side street were turned off, but even in the dim light I could see frost forming on the parked cars. The next hospital was only a couple of blocks away and so I walked.

The ER was mostly empty, save for some guys who were drunk or high or maybe both, so I got to see a doctor rather quickly. I explained everything again—dizziness, headaches, stomach cramps—and then told him that there was something in me. “It’s, like, black and moves around like a worm. It’s about this size.” I pointed to my pinkie finger’s nail. He asked me where it was. “I saw it in my legs. Like in my thigh. But it keeps moving around. Sometimes it vanishes.” He looked at me skeptically. Looking back, I think he might’ve contemplated institutionalizing me. “I can show it to you, if you don’t believe me.” With that, I started unbuckling my belt, but he held up his hand for me to stop.

“That won’t be necessary,” he said. “Try to make an appointment with your primary care provider—and get some rest.” He wrote me a prescription for some melatonin and pushed me out the door with it.

I came home just before Sarah had to wake up for work, so I lay down again and pretended to be asleep. It felt good to hear her move around, walking on her toes, trying not to make too much noise while she prepped her breakfast. It felt normal. I felt normal again, even if just for a bit. Maybe it was all in my head after all. Food poisoning and sleep deprivation. All that and an anxious personality.

Once I heard the lock click into place, I got up again. I was dead tired but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep after all that, not with this thing gnawing—maybe literally—at me. The whole time I had walked home that night I felt my leg, my left upper thigh, just moving, felt something squirming just under the surface, pushing against my skin. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I was not gonna let it go unchecked. I sat down on the edge of the bathtub, flashlight in hand, and started searching up and down my leg, holding the lamp right up against my skin so I could see all the veins right under it. There was nothing in my left thigh, where I had seen it during nighttime, and nothing in the rest of the leg, when I saw something—it—flit across my left arm. Quickly, I put the flashlight there and—fuck. Standing out clearly against the backdrop of orange-red glowing flesh was a tiny dark dot burrowing around my left forearm. I dropped the flashlight. Something was in me.

* * *

I had vowed not to go back to that habit, but when Sarah came home, she found me lying on the sofa in a depression nap—not actually sleeping but just staring at the ceiling depersonalizing. She sat down right next to me and started wordlessly stroking my hair. “There’s something inside my body and I think it wants to kill me,” I told her. She only hugged me.

She slept with me on the sofa that night, her as the big spoon and me as the little one. She breathed so rhythmically and softly, in any other situation I would’ve cried, but my mind was racing. I could feel it inside me now. All those random muscle pains I’d had over the past few weeks, that was it—that thing, whatever it was—eating its way through my flesh. I just knew it. The dizziness, the stomach cramps, the headaches—I didn’t even want to think about it. I resolved then and there that I would get rid of this thing, even if I had to do it all by myself.

Again, I pretended to be asleep so that Sarah could just get up and leave without worrying too much about me. She kissed me on the forehead before leaving and as soon as she was gone, I went into the bathroom. I sat down on the bathtub again, flashlight in my left hand this time and a fresh razor blade in my right. I tried to concentrate, really focus on my body telling me where to look. I felt a tingling sensation in my right upper thigh and immediately pressed the flashlight to it. It was just some four inches below my hip bone, slowly moving downward towards my knee. It was now or never. One small cut and it would all be over. I took a deep breath and clenched my teeth.

It didn’t hurt as much as I had remembered, but it bled a lot more to make up for it. I grabbed a towel and pressed it firmly onto the wound. After a minute or so it started to burn, but the bleeding slowly stopped. I was relieved. I must’ve sliced it in half. I grabbed the flashlight to check. Underneath the sticky blood was just the usual web of veins, but nothing left over from the thing. Thank God, I thought. It’s gone. I dressed the wound and fell onto the couch, already asleep by the time I hit the cushion.

* * *

I woke up to the sound of Sarah’s key turning in our door lock. I shot up like a dog when you shake its food bowl and ran right up to her for a hug. “You’re certainly better,” she said with her face buried into my shoulder, or something to that effect; I wasn’t gonna let her go just get. We had dinner—she ordered Chinese takeout to celebrate—and watched some dumb made-for-streaming sci-fi drama. “You’re gonna come back to bed?” she asked after the third episode. For an answer, I buried my face in the curve of her neck.

Fuck, the wound, I thought. Jess was already getting ready for bed putting on her pajamas. “Would you mind if I kept my sweatpants on tonight?” I asked.

“Aren’t you gonna get hot?”

“I still feel a bit cold, actually.” She only shrugged.

We climbed into bed, she the big spoon and I the little spoon. “Good night,” she whispered. “Sleep well.”

“G’night,” I whispered back. “I love you.”

Slowly, she traced her right hand along my leg, from the knee upwards, drawing little swirls. “D’you think you’ll be well enough again tomorrow night for us t—“ I drew in my breath sharply as she touched over the part with the wound. “Is everything okay?” She propped herself up on her elbow. The jig was up before it even started.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. “I, like clipped my leg on the counter today really badly. It bled a little and I guess it’s still a bit sore.”

She looked down at my upturned face. “You’re awfully clumsy for someone who works with knives for a living.”

* * *

Two days later, it happened again. I had felt better going into the weekend, but then the headaches and the dizziness and the stomach cramps came back and I decided to delay going back to work for another day or two. It was Sunday when I saw it again, this time moving around my left leg, while sitting on the toilet. I did not jump this time, did not even tense up. I could just feel the rage and anger at my own failure rise inside me like liquid fire. I got up and took another razor blade out of the bathroom cabinet. I had missed once but I would not miss again.

Sarah was in the living room, so I had to be quiet and quick. I had no flashlight, so I had to do it by sight. I propped my leg up on the edge of the bathtub and took aim. I could still see it, shifting, moving between the surface layer of my skin and the deep flesh of my thigh. It didn’t know what was coming. Once it slowed down a little, I made a cut, right across where it sat. A second later, beads of blood started forming on the wound and then it resurfaced an inch down, unharmed. Fuck. Either it wasn’t deep enough or I was too slow. The cut started to burn, but I bit down and carried on, waited for it to rise again and did another cut, deeper and quicker this time. Grinding my teeth was all I could do to keep from crying out in pain. This time, an entire thin stream of blood started gushing out of the wound immediately, running down my leg. I just so managed to step fully into the bathtub, before it reached the ground. And still, that thing, that black worm, was working it’s way down my leg, unbothered. I placed another cut and another, miss after miss, and only stopped once I reached my knee, which was too bony to cut into.

By this point, I was too dizzy to stand. I sat down in the thin puddle of blood. Something was in me and it was slowly killing me and I couldn’t get it out. This realization finally dawned on me in all its gravity. If I showed up to the ER or a doctor again, they would take one look at my wounds and likely put me away in a padded cell after hearing my story. No, I had to do this alone; for Sarah’s sake as well mine.

Washing the wounds hurt like hell; they went down all the way into the fat layer. I went back to Sarah and we watched a movie together—I don’t even remember what it was about; I didn’t pay any attention. The whole time, I could feel my left thigh burning with pain and even through that I could feel the tiny tingling sensation of the worm making it’s way through my tissue, rummaging around in those wounds, gorging itself on my blood.

“Evie?” Sarah asked me. I looked at her blankly. “I asked you if you want to go to bed.”

“I’m not tired,” I said.

She looked at me in mild disbelief. “Baby, I am. It’s eleven.” She started to laugh and after a second, I joined her. “Let’s brush our teeth.” She took my hand and guided me up, but the very first step I took, I felt a jolt of pain run up my leg, so bad that I fell to the ground. Immediately, Sarah crouched down and asked me what happened. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. Right after, another flash of pain hit me and I had to grimace.

“Baby, what is it?” I had never seen her this worried.

“My leg,” I gasped. I couldn’t lie to her face now.

She put her hand on my waistband. “Can I?” I only nodded. The band-aids had already soaked through and even stained the inside of my sweatpants. The single cut on my right leg was still clearly visible as well. I could see tears pooling in Sarah’s eyes. I felt guilty.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. She hugged me. She’d never hugged me this tightly before.

“It’s alright,” she said and caressed my back. “We’ll make it through this one too.”

* * *

Sarah took the razor blades with her to work. I had asked her to. She had made me breakfast and I felt guilty because I could hardly keep it down. I slept, I woke, I stared at the ceiling. I tried not to think about what was inside of me; I failed. Every second I could feel it moving under my skin, swimming around in my arteries, growing fat from eating away at me. Every time I thought about it, I spiraled and spiraled, until I couldn’t take it anymore and sprang up, ran into the kitchen and drew a long, thin knife out of the wood block, but by the time I got there, the sensation had gone away again and I couldn’t locate the worm anymore. I was frustrated to the point of tears.

I took a shower to try to calm myself down. The warm water soothed me, though it stung as it flowed over the cuts on my legs. I washed all the grime and sticky blood out of them that had built up over the course of the day, but as I did so, I saw it once more. The black worm, wriggling its way up my leg from below, slowly approaching the new wounds. Again, that feeling rose in me, like liquid fire in my stomach, burning upwards into my esophagus. I had to do it, now, no hesitation. I waited till it had crossed to the deepest wound, the one going down to the fat, and plunged my hand in to pull it out.

I almost passed out from the pain—but when I could open my eyes again, it was gone. I do not remember the moment I did it all that well, just the pain, the flash of light before my eyes and the black worm, like an ugly tadpole, flailing on the floor of the shower and vanishing down the drain, followed by a deluge of blood. And that was it.

* * *

After that, I got better. The dizziness lasted another couple of days, but that might have been due to blood loss. No more stomach cramps, no headaches, no muscle pains. No more tingling sensation. I had dressed the re-opened wound and told Sarah nothing. We didn’t talk about it anymore. I went back to my job at the restaurant. Everything was normal.

A week later, to celebrate, we decided to make sushi. I had gone out and gotten all the ingredients from the store at the corner. I felt like a movie protagonist walking there; I wanted to swing around every street light. I had prepped the rice and was starting to work on cutting the vegetables by the time Sarah came home. She dumped all her stuff in the hallway, poured herself a cup of coffee and told me all about her day while I started making the actual sushi. I rolled up the maki roll, pressing on the mat to make sure everything was stuck together nicely and grabbed my chef’s knife to cut it into pieces. Suddenly, Sarah grabbed her forehead, a pained expression on her face. “Is everything okay?” I asked her.

“Yeah, I think it’s just my period. I just had a bit of brain fog today or like a tension headache. I don’t know. It gets worse for a while and then it gets better.” She began massaging her neck. I glanced over at her. Perspiration gathered on her forehead. A tiny black worm wriggled around under her skin just above her left eye, barely visible, moving downwards. Without thinking, I tightened my grip around the handle of the knife and clenched my jaw.