Slitherworm

       I’m walking like a giant, a hill at a step. I step over valleys. Do not let me wound my bare feet on the biting twigs of trees. The plants slither far below. They crawl beneath my foot-fingers. The valleys grow wide – I can’t step over them. I touch down low the tips of my toes, then jerk my feet up, nervously, draw them up to the hill. I hunker on high ground, reclining.

     ‘Glass of wine? Reddest we have.’

      ‘Thank you’, says I. ‘If I spill, it won’t spoil your divan. It’s a pretty scarlet.’

     ‘Do you like my hill? It’s a blood-red couch above swarming holes below. Here we avoid infection by means of comfort. We fight cold with warmth, while you fight cold with cold.’

     ‘I’ve been stepping on snakes.’

     ‘They can’t hurt you if you learn the right walk. Walk on them right and they can’t bite. They can’t enter your body if you don’t commit your weight. Don’t get too carried away with gravity. If you dismiss gravity, that’s when you get carried away, and lifted up.’

     I look way down, down and nether-down, beneath the nest of couches on high to the nest of worms below. All my friends and family sit flushed and happy around me, cradled in the crook of the hill, the nook of their nest on high.

     Down below the earth moves in a filigree of flesh. The ground slithers, purple, green and blue. The valleys heave with worms. I step down, looking at greener hills further off and further north. Egypt – land of bread and sweets and soft lords – you’re no home to me.

     I’ve a long way to walk. But will I get to keep my legs? I use them - I wade into the river. It's muddy and brown, opening into ponds between rivers. Rivers and ponds. Slither.

     'Is it safe to wade, wade and drink?'

     'Don't fret, have at. Don't worry at the waters that go under. The underwaters will keep you. Don't defile our Nile!'

     I look into the water and see the depths slither. They teem with sinewy serpentine forms with heads like fanged puff adders, bodies like eels, mouths like lamprey mouths, bulbous eyes like toad eyes. I probe one with a long knobby branch - it sticks to the stick. I pull upward - the thing coils out of water, stuck to my rod, to my finger-tree. I recoil. ‘Those things are vicious’, says my uncle. ‘They’re called Fishstrikers and they’re killing all the fish.’ My father, trying to be an optimist, says in a calm, curious voice: ‘But have you seen their eyes? They’ve beautiful eyes. Beautiful eyes.’

     I walk on. I step to the music of the charmer - right on top of the worms. Worms in the bottoms of the hollows.

     I see a distant friend in the distance. He's far, closing in. He charges me, remarking, ‘If you want to avoid infection, all you need to do is get a pendulating lilting motion going between the rises and the dips. See here, watch me. Do as I do.’ And my friend goes off bounding, singing as he lopes, lunging up, falling back, care-free on his free feet. ‘Don’t get attached – get lost in the movement. Do you think I got snakes? I aint got a wormy beast in me.’

     I give it a try. I go on a long journey, up and down. Up and down. Down and up.

     I look at the veins in my forearm, the rivers of my flesh. I see blue under the membrane. Not the blue sky above – but the blue sky below. Something like a thousand tiny ribbons is moving through my blood, my blue blood. Larvae. Snake babies, sneaking into my Innermost In. Inn-vading the Inn-keeper. Won’t the worms grow until they burst the veins?

     The Egyptian princess sits on her divan, a toad for the nematodes. She’s afflicted by little dragons inside her. I hear her cry – ‘I walked too long in the valleys, tried too long to reach the hills. Now snakes are crawling out of my legs. My rotting legs. So amputated, how will I walk to Paradise?’

~~~Written by Nathan Hillman



My Influences in Fiction:

Kafka
Novalis
Sigmund Freud
George MacDonald
J.R.R. Tolkien
David Lindsay (Voyage to Arcturus)
William Morris (Well at the World’s End and The Roots of the Mountains)
G.K. Chesterton (Manalive)
James Joyce
Snorri Sturluson (Snorra Edda)
Elder Edda, Beowulf, Muspilli, Heliand, Anglo-Saxon & Old High German narrative poetry, Scots-English ballads, Danish & Swedish ballads, northern European folksong
Irish, Native American, Uralian, and Siberian mythology & narrative
Old and New Testaments
Tarjei Vesaas
Sigrid Undset
Knut Hamsun (especially Pan, Mysterier, Sult, Landstrykere)
E. A. Wyke-Smith

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QUOTATIONS OF SOURCES BEHIND CREATIVE WRITING EXCERPT



Upon Corpse Strand, far from the sun,
she saw a hall – its doors open North;
Its roof shafts dripped with venom drops –
That hall’s wound with spines of serpents.
(Völuspá, ‘The Prophecy of the Seeress’, The Elder Edda, Strophe 38. Cōdex Rēgius, Iceland, 1270s)


‘Wrap the emerging end of the worm around a stick and slowly pull it out.’
(Ebers Papyrus, 1550 BC)



WORD LORE

Dracunculiasis: Latin, ‘affliction with little dragons’

Other names: Dracunculosis, Dracontiasis, Guinea worm infection, Medina worm, Serpent worm, Dragon worm, Pharaoh worm, Avicenna worm



DREAMS

My whole life, I’ve had dreams of snakes and worms that bite or burrow. The first dream I ever remember, at age 4 or 5, featured our garden shrub turning into worm-limbs with straining snake-heads like cobras.



GLIMPSE OF AN HISTORICAL WOMAN INFILTRATED BY ‘LITTLE DRAGONS’:

The Manchester Mummy Project (1980s – present): In the mid 1980s, a calcified male Guinea worm (Dracunculus) was found in the abdominal cavity of a royal teenage mummy girl (1000s BC, New Kingdom, Egypt). Her lower legs – the usual exit point of the female worm – had been amputated. It’s not easy to wind out the worm without breaking its spaghetti body – and there may be dozens more to grow and writhe out through the skin. The exit holes lead to gangrene & ulceration over time.




SOURCES


Clinical Microbiology Reviews. American Society for Microbiology: Dracunculiasis (Guinea Worm Disease) and the Eradication Initiative, April 2002. (http://cmr.asm.org/cgi/content/full/15/2/223#Morphology, 2011)

‘Dracontiasis in Antiquity’, P. B. Adamson. Medical History, 32: 204-209, 1988. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1139858/pdf/medhist00063-0093.pdf )

The Ebers Papyrus: A New English Translation, Commentaries, and Glossaries. Paul Ghalioungui. (Cairo: Academy of Scientific Research and Technology, 1987). (Quotation from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebers_Papyrus, 15 July 2011)

Edda. Die Lieder des Codex Regius nebst verwandten Denkmälern. Gustav Neckel, ed. by Hans Kuhn (Carl Winter, Heidelberg: 1936, 1962, 1983).

The Imaging of Tropical Diseases: Guinea Worm Infection (Dracunculiasis). (http://www.isradiology.org/tropical_deseases/tmcr/chapter27/intro.htm)

Numbers 21:6. English Standard Version

Under Wraps: Rosalie David in Conversation. Interviewed 6 February 2001. A Publication of the Archaeological Institute of America. (http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/mummies/ , 2011)