Weight of the World
Written By: M. Cronin
"I read about a weird kind of worm," Ty said, as Atlas burst from the lake's cool waters and staggered to the shallows with a spluttering gasp. “It’s going extinct. They called it a feasting worm, or something, ‘cus sometimes it consumes so much soil that it actually drowns inside its own body. Isn’t that messed up?”
The sun was campfire-scorching above them; muggy heat in the air, flies buzzing around the still waters of the lake's edge. A verdinous green forest bordered the shining water.
Their tents weren’t far away, and the day stretched out in front of them, warm and promising. Ty, crouched on the rocks, was poking something with a stick, unimpressed by Atlas’s wet body.
“You read some weird books,“ Atlas said, words stretched over a laugh. They bent low and grabbed their toes, wet hair dripping, pulling at their sore muscles. It had been a long swim from one shore to the other; it felt delicious, the powerful throb of used energy.
“Shut up, you don’t read at all.” Ty stood up, dropping their stick. “Come on, I'll race you back to the tents.”
The fat earthworm Ty had been poking curled into itself, trying to retreat into the cool recesses of the pebbles and the damp earth beneath them. Atlas didn’t spare it much thought.
Ty ran cross-country, so naturally, Atlas wanted to beat them; Ty took off, and Atlas scrambled to grab their bag and catch up, laughing, feet slipping on the damp shore.
Saturday, Atlas woke with the sunrise. That meant too early, but it was beautiful waking that way in a tent, thin rays of sun dancing through the canvas. They stretched out on the lumpy old yoga mat. Pulled their sleeping bag down to scratch at their belly. Their finger caught on something itchy; a bug bite, innocent enough.
Atlas muttered, “Fucking bugs,“ and got up to start the camping stove for coffee. Soon, it would be time to pack their tents and start the cycle home, but they could enjoy, first, the new morning sun, and the fresh energy of the forest in summer, where the whole world was alive.
***
Early Monday, still in the birdsong hour, their alarm went off; a sharp bleat of their phone, tossed somewhere on the bedside table. It was the usual alarm. It signified a well-tested cascade of events—rise, stretch, smoothie, run. They took a thirty-minute route around the edge of town every morning, beating the pavement with their running shoes, now so worn the soles were coming apart in halves.
Atlas's gut twinged when they rolled over and tried to beat their alarm into silence. There was something odd in their body today. A post-run tiredness in a pre-run body. For a few long seconds they just lay there, heavy in the tangled sheets, feeling the wind blustering off the overgrown garden behind their narrow townhouse and through their cracked window.
It was warm but not boiling, in the trailing end of the summer where the scorched wildlife began to retreat and recoup for autumn. Something was boiling in Atlas, though. Still half-asleep in a way they weren't used to, a bruised soreness clinging to the sockets of their eyes, Atlas found themselves scratching their belly before they realised what they were doing. A hard scratch, satisfying almost in the way sex could be satisfying, a tingling relief of something when they pressed down with the sharp edges of their nails on a blaring pain.
When they managed to blink down, brain catching up with their primal fingertips too late, they saw what they were scratching. Their bug bite had swollen, blistered, and spread a blotchy patch of red irritation in a fat circle across their skin.
“Ew,“ Atlas said, pressing their tongue to the back of their teeth, sitting up a little against the pillows. They forced themselves to stop itching, though the tingling unpleasantness returned as soon as they pulled their fingers away.
Atlas curled over and inspected it; the stinging swell, a raised red blister that almost looked like a nipple, low on their belly. It hurt, but it was only a usual sort of hurt. They were used to mosquitoes and horseflies, the penalties of a life lived outdoors and their penchant to swim in deep waters or run rocky trails.
The lingering tiredness was something else. For the first time since a sprained ankle eighteen months ago, Atlas hit snooze, and skipped their morning run.
***
By the end of the week, it was a slog. They weren't usually a slogging person. Atlas loved doing things—their landscaping job, karaoke on Tuesdays with their old school friends, ultimate Frisbee on Thursdays with their old Uni friends, cycling holidays every six months with their cycling friends, the trans rugby club every other weekend with their rugby friends. They'd been considering joining a rock-climbing group. The first meeting was two weeks
away.
Plans were less appealing when it got harder to wake up each morning. The bug bite didn't swell any further, but the exhaustion persevered, leaden and uncharacteristic.
On Friday, Atlas got the bus to work instead of cycling, leaning against the window to feel the rumble of the engine in their bones.
***
The last week of August presented the first rainstorm in a month. The same day, there was an odd, tingling sensation in Atlas's hands and feet. Atlas understood it to be the sensation of pins and needles—not unfamiliar as an experience. The problem was that it wouldn't go away. Like they had plunged their feet into static, and something was buzzing around in there. They were overly aware of the buzzing, hearing it almost as a sound, although it wasn’t one.
Still, it followed them.
Atlas could still walk with numb feet—it just felt weird. They took it slow down the creaky stairs, holding onto the banister instead of hopping two-at-a-time. There was something squeamish about it, though the sensation wasn’t painful. Just a wrongness. The television-static feeling pervaded them with the idea of absence; that somebody had turned off the channel to their nerves in the most delicate edges of their body.
Leaning over the kitchen counter, Atlas looked at the ingredients for their morning smoothie—defrosted greens, fresh strawberries, almond milk, chalky protein powder—and couldn't be bothered. A hot nausea was boiling over in their stomach. Not the threat of real vomit, but a tightness that made them want to keep their mouth closed, like they’d been sealed up.
They felt resistant putting anything in their body at all. It was already heavy inside them, like they’d had a full meal, though they hadn’t eaten.
Rubbing at their belly with the tingling, fuzzy tips of their fingers, Atlas texted their boss that they needed a sick day. It was the first sick day they’d ever taken from this job, but whatever this virus was, they were sure they’d fight it off soon.
***
The heaviness grew. Grew, grew, grew. Atlas had previously understood only living things to grow, but this sensation was not something living; or if it was, it was living in the way a mushroom lived, inexplicable and unreplicatable, under the dark shod of earth.
They didn't go back to work that week.
In bed, the density of their muscles pulled them down into the unwashed sheets. It was like being full of rocks. Atlas had never experienced the sensation before, and if they thought about it too long, they began to feel sick, nauseated by their own panic and the strange, childish urge to cry. They fought the urge. Knew they’d get better soon, doubtlessly; their body had never betrayed them.
A fly had come in through the cracked window. It buzzed around the space, inching closer, closer. It would drone in little circles for a minute, then pause, on the wall or the
dresser. Then take flight once more, landing a little closer. Closer, again.
Their laptop was playing a video that Atlas wasn’t paying attention to, eyes heavy and sore. Instead, they watched the fly, trying to will it back towards the window. The garden outside was heaving with the dying gasp of summer; overgrown grass crispy and yellowed, a flurry of insects whose short lives would end with the season trying to make their time count. Atlas could hear the buzzing, chirping landscape from their place in bed. The fly was breaking an unspoken barrier by entering.
It buzzed closer again, nearly at their head this time. Atlas raised a hand to swat at it, but the motion pulled in the deep tendons of their arm, something twinging and moving in a way muscles ought not to have moved. It made them choke for a moment, coughing; the tingling numbness in their fingers got worse. Atlas forced their heavy body to roll to the side and grab a magazine from the bedside table to use as a weapon, but their fingers grasped
futilely, unable to muster the strength to grip it. The paper fell to the floor with an unpleasant thump, and, exhausted by the effort, they let their aching arm fall back into the mattress.
A cough racked their body, and they swallowed a lump in the back of their sore throat, something foul-tasting and thick.
Voices murmured on their laptop, a stupid show about extreme sports flashing images of mountain climbers on the screen, posing proudly with their flags on a rocky outcrop, miles above the earth.
The fly landed on Atlas’s face, and stayed there, unmoving. Its itchy weight bored into their skin. Atlas closed their eyes, too heavy to move.
***
For a third week off work, they needed a sick note. Atlas tried to make a doctor’s appointment from bed, but their fingers were fuzzy and useless, strength barely managing to hold up the phone. They tried, and ended the attempt ten minutes later, breathless, clammy with sweat and sore in their bones.
Something clammed in the back of their throat.
Coughing was bad, but worse was the dragging weight of their body which made it hard, even, to follow the cough; it took over their body and they couldn’t move to support or resist it. Their throat opened and gaped as they hacked, flat on their back, wet pain stinging the corners of their eyes. The room had begun to smell awful, like the sheets they’d been sweating in for weeks and not had the energy to change. A pungent sort of aroma, unlike the sharp sweat of exertion. It was almost earthen, terraceous. Something rancid leeching from their pores.
More flies had been gathering in the room, since the first, probably drawn to the loamy scent of their sick sweat. They hovered over Atlas’s body, now, creating a low hum that made real the phantom sound they imagined their tingling limbs to be making, too. The static came alive.
Ty had texted a couple times this week. In the long stretches of foggy awake hours, Atlas managed to pull open the text thread and read back through the last few messages; a couple from them, a few weeks ago now, complaining about having a cold, Ty teasing them for not knowing how to handle a little illness.
Now it was longer stretches between messages. Ty checking in, asking if they were okay. The screen blinked, a little flashing dot urging them to reply.
Another cough racked Atlas’s body, sharply and abruptly, and they dropped the phone with a lurch. It was a knife’s pain to their raw throat, the centre of their aching lungs, where they were still able to feel, outside of the fizzing emptiness in their extremities. It caught the breath out of them, made them choke.
Atlas rolled to their side in an agonising surge of exertion, and hacked open-mouthed against their sweaty pillow. Their numb fingers grasped ineffectually for the blankets, desperate for something cling to; they didn’t manage. In a moment of blind terror, the air stuck in their throat, and they were sure they were going to die. The worst cough yet forced its way through their brittle chest and choked out of their throat, and Atlas came back to awareness, gasping, face soaked with tears.
They’d coughed something up. Atlas squinted at it in exhaustion, trying to make sense of the sight. A few of flies in the room descended on it immediately, landing on the fat, wet globule staining Atlas’s sheets; a lump, dark and brown, with scarlet blood sloughing off of it.
Their curtains were half-open, window still cracked as it had been for weeks. A last gasp of heat for the season had struck, leaving the air frazzled and warm. Sunlight taunted
through the window as their dark, foul room enveloped them.
It felt their body had been glued to the earth. Atlas sucked in a few painful breaths against their raspy throat. They didn’t want to be in their disgusting bed, or the room with the flies, with the bloody residue of their cough.
Atlas had spent most of their life pushing their body to do impossible things. While the metric had changed, they tried, through the haze of their mind and fuzzy nausea of their rebelling body, to remember that kind of determination, and rolled out of the bed, landing with a painful, splintering crash on the floor.
***
They were grateful for living alone when nobody was there to see them crawl, half on their numb hands and half on the itching painful spot of their belly; a pathetic crawl, wormlike and infantile, but the only way they now found they could really move. They hadn’t eaten in days, but their stomach was full and hard as a rock. It made an odd, stinging bile rise in the back of their throat if they thought about it too much, the tender sensation inside of them.
Long grass waved in the breezy garden when they heaved themselves out the back door. A wet-mouthed gasp took over them, the full shudder of relief, when the air touched their skin. It was fresh. Warm. Sunlight beamed down on them, a syrupy kiss on their bare chest.
Atlas rolled over into the grass and, finally, let their body relax.
It felt, at first, like sinking. Like laying down, their boulder-heavy muscles spilling into the soil, the tension of their rasping lungs letting go. For the first time in a while, Atlas became aware of the sensation on their belly; an itch so strong and relentless that it had ceased to be noticeable, filling every part of their body until they didn’t remember how it had been to exist without it.
The urge to scratch was too strong. Atlas flopped their useless fingers onto the plane of their belly and pushed, digging their fingernails into the nipple’s eye of the old, infected bite.
For a second, it felt so good their eyes whited, their throat caught, their head rocketed up and then tilted back into the soil. They snagged on the worse, itchiest, foulest point of the bulge, and ripped at it, pulling back the raw nerves and tingling flesh that had been hurting so bad, scratching harder, now, with the last bit of strength in their leaden arms.
When their vision came back, Atlas, staring down at the traitorous expanse of their body, saw what they’d done.
The flesh was ripped from their belly, from navel to waist, in a long, dripping strip. The crimson, bloody mess of viscera and flesh hung from their side, and they gasped, catching as a cough that made them choke; they tried to scramble away from their own belly, but it resulted only in a feeble wriggling on the earth, the long grass scratching at their head, at the buzzing crevices of their ears.
The noise grew louder, and louder, and inside Atlas, where the meat of their muscles and organs should have been exposed by the monstrous opening of their flesh, was the earth.
Their ears split with the buzzing, and Atlas lost it. They grappled for their belly, goring the flesh with their nails, and craggy lumps of blackened soil spilled from their gut,
wriggling, squirming; loamy earth filled with grubs, etiolated and sickly white, gnawing at each other, while larger worms pulsated through the mess, spitting out wet chunks of mud atop them. The earth moved. The insects devoured each other, a frantic orgy of cannibalistic movement, in the heavy earth of Atlas’s insides.
In the droning numbness in Atlas’s hands and feet, the skin squirmed, alien lumps tugging at the fibrous strands holding their flesh together. Atlas tried to scream, but it was drowned out by the foaming of earth in the back of their throat, making them gargle and hack and nothing really coming out as their skin split, and a colony of squirming flies poured from their limbs, leaving their flesh behind as an empty cocoon, limp and useless on the ground.
The colony of insects squirmed over their body, joyous in their new freedom, bringing their bloody earthen trails with them, swarming over Atlas’s mouth, over their nose, plugging the gasping holes of their body. Digging their tiny, inhuman mouths into the ragged edges of Atlas’s pooling flesh, they swallowed it, digested it, poured the soil out over them, and as the soil came spilling from their body, as the whole earth did, Atlas thought, only, of how good it felt to be light inside. Like everything had left them. All the ache burrowed out, all the relentless pain spilled to the ground.
Blackness crawled over their eyes in wet trails of squirming maggots, and the searing pain felt so good that they let their mind go. The worms covered them, feasting, and Atlas went into the earth.
M Cronin (they/them) is a writer of uncanny queer horror for readers who enjoy the dark. They hold two degrees in Creative Writing and have previously been featured by publications such as Aesthetica.