"Ear Worm” by Lena Ng

EAR WORM

By Lena Ng

Elmer, for the sixty-third time that day, hummed that stupid song in his head out loud. “Tooda do, tooda dee, tooda doodle do,” he sang. He hummed it as he filled the coffee machine. He hummed it as he took a shower. He aggravated everyone around him on the bus and while waiting in line at the Value Mart. Damn earworm, as his mother would say, for a snippet of song stuck in a mental loop. It played over and over in his mind. In some faint way, Elmer knew how annoying he was. But he couldn’t get it out of his head. He was humming that blasted song later that evening as he was emptying the dishwasher. In the middle of the refrain—

CRASH

Something big had banged against the house. It rattled the aluminum siding. A discharge of blue light filled his country-style kitchen. Cautiously, he peered out the kitchen window. Squinting against the blue light, Elmer stared at the smoking hole in his yard, the grass flattened and burnt. A large rock, glowing a faint blue with a surface pocked with craters and larger than his head, indented the centre of his carefully manicured yard. A meteorite with an interesting, radiation-blue glow. Elmer’s heart leapt with excitement. A gift from the cosmos. And it could hold aliens. Aliens! All his life he had awaited their arrival. He had the tinfoil hats (which he shaped into antennae, all the better to hear them with), the bug-eyed, big-headed plastic models, and the complete series of The X-Fileson DVD, lovingly watched and re-watched as he had developed—as most fans had—a fierce crush on Dana Scully. Wouldn’t it be amazing if he—Elmer P. Elmsdale— discovered extraterrestrial life?

He threw off his apron as he raced from the house. Elmer stood at the edge of the smoking hole and stooped to examine his find. A beautiful, smoking, glowing rock. As the smoke dissipated and the glow slowly dampened, Elmer extended a hand and cautiously touched the rock. Warm, but not hot. Rough. He placed a hand on either side of the rock and loosened it from his yard. It wasn’t too heavy when he picked it up and brought it back into the house.  On the coffee table, the blue light faded away at last. “Hello?” Elmer called out to the rock.

“Is there anybody in there?” He studied the rock from every angle—from eye level on the coffee table, from directly overhead, from lying on the floor. He examined it with a magnifying glass. He peered into its crevasses. He poked, with a pencil, its craters. He rocked it and tapped it and turned it over and over.

Just as Elmer was about to give up and go to bed, a trio of tiny eyes on a tiny round head burst out of the rock. It was as if someone glued a triangle of plastic eyes on the head of a blue earthworm. Elmer shrank back. The worm did as well. Elmer leaned forward. “Hi, little guy,” Elmer cooed. “Don’t be frightened.”

The worm made a trilling sound as it again poked out of the rock. “Aww,” Elmer said. “You have nothing to worry about, I come in pe—” Emitting a small cloud, the worm shot out of the rock. Elmer felt a slimy jolt and an alarming wriggle. He clapped a hand over his ear. What the heck? Damn thing invaded his ear canal. He poked in his pinky and rooted around.

<Cut that out,> the voice inside his ear said. Elmer and his little finger halted. He plucked his finger out of his ear. “Uhh, what’s going on?”

A small, unnerving waggle. < I’m a traveller exploring the galaxy.>

“Does it have to be in my ear?” <It’s a fast and easy way to get around. No limbs, you see. Undetectable, too. Most people are hostile to aliens, human or otherwise. All this ‘alien abduction’ and ‘they’re stealing our jobs’ business giving us a bad rap.>

Elmer thought about what the worm said, and it seemed to make sense. “What do you want me to do?”

<Just go about your day. We can start in the morning.> Elmer went upstairs and tried to get some sleep. In the comforts of Elmer's ear canal, the worm gave a light, trilling snore.

 Elmer staggered into the bathroom. He turned on the shower. After running for two minutes, the glass shower doors began to steam up. Worm or no worm, Elmer couldn’t help but relax while standing under the hot water. “Tooda do, tooda dee, tooda doodle do,” he sang as he soaped away.

As Elmer dried off, his singing filled the small bathroom. As he started shaving, the worm popped its head out, assessing them both in the steamy mirror. <Why are you singing that song all the time?>

“I’ve got an earworm.” <Another one?> “It’s deep in my brain, and I can’t get rid of it.”

Elmer felt the alien worm pop back into his ear. It squirmed, burrowing deeper. <How did it get in there?>

Elmer’s nerves went off like a five-alarm fire. “My brain? What's it to ya?” <Just askin’. Not like we're trying to take over Earth.> "WHAT?"

<Haha,> the worm laughed weakly with a trio of shifty eyes.  Elmer spent the next day announcing his exciting discovery. He called up his parents who listened patiently. He resurrected a long-abandoned blog. He posted it on Facebook and got thirty-seven “Likes.” He called NASA and left a voicemail. Over the next week, Elmer showed the worm the town. They went to the aquarium and ogled the octopuses. They skipped on the freshly-cut grass in the park, carefree as little girls. They munched on popcorn at the movies. They browsed for avocados at the farmer's market; they puzzled over post-modern art at the gallery; they cruised through the Science Center, where, when asked about its home planet, the worm vaguely waved to the space left of Neptune.

But, after two weeks, like the saying of fish and guests, the worm overstayed its welcome. The constant tickle of the alien grew into a deep-seated itch, a rash which seemed to extend into Elmer's brain.

After another busy day of sight-seeing, an exhausted Elmer asked, while flopping on the couch, "When are you going?" The itching was slowly driving him crazy. Maybe the worm shed a protein that sensitized him over time. He had taken to walking around with a Q-tip in his ear, disregarding his ridiculousness.

In contrast, the alien worm stretched out in its comfortably-warm, ear canal abode. <Thanks for taking me around. I really like it here. I think I'll stay.> "In my ear?" <Why not?> "You can't stay there." <Why not?> "Because you're itchy and wiggly and you talk all the time. No offense."

<You constantly hum to yourself and you smell like salami and—I don’t even have hands— but I know you scratch yourself in terrible places. No offense.> Elmer jammed the Q-tip around in his ear. The worm stretched, dodged, and ducked. "You get out, or I'll get you out."

The worm crawled in deeper than Elmer's Q-tip dared to follow. <Make me.>

 Deep in the emergency room, surrounded by impatient, suffering patients, Elmer was causing a commotion. He was screaming, "I said, get out, get out, GET OUT!" Each “get out” was punctuated with a punch, from Elmer's own fist, to the side of Elmer's own head. The triage nurse, wearing a starched white cap and uniform, pretended to review some paperwork as she inched her hand under the desk to the panic button.

Elmer realized the rest of the patients were staring at him. He snatched the paperwork from the triage desk and shuffled to an empty seat in the crowded waiting room, digging fruitlessly with his finger into the offending ear.

A few seats over, nudging his son, an annoyed dad pointed at Elmer and said in a loud stage whisper, "And that's why you don't stick anything in your ear."

The alien worm started giggling. <Guess you didn't listen to your dad.> "You leave my dad out of this." <Your momma…> "YOU LEAVE HER OUT OF THIS!” Elmer roared. More shocked stares, and Elmer muttered through the side of his mouth, “Can you keep it down? Everyone thinks I’m crazy.”

<If you had some discretion, people would think you were talking on a cell phone.> “You know about cell phones?” <I'm a talking, travelling, interplanetary worm. We're waaaaypast cell phones.> Finally, Elmer's name was called to be assessed by the physician. A gangly, cadaverous doctor ushered him into an evaluation room with a white tiled floor and glaring fluorescent lights. After Elmer nervously settled into the examination chair, the doctor intoned, "From all the screaming and punching in the waiting room, you sound like you're having a psychotic break. How long have you been hearing voices?"

Elmer gripped the chair's padded arms like he was riding a rollercoaster at Disneyland. "I'm not crazy, just look in my effing ear!"

<Haha, earth fool. Think you can get rid of me so easily?> "Get out of there!" <Never!> Humoring the bellowing, belligerent nutcase, the doctor hummed to himself as he calmly poked at Elmer's ear canal with his medical tools. His invading utensils halted. "What do we have here?" He gave an excited chuckle. "A blue-coloured parasite. Don't see one of those every day." The doctor rummaged in a drawer for a syringe of lidocaine which would kill the worm, and a stainless steel hook.

Elmer felt a shotgun blast of air as the worm burst from his ear. As though the worm had pulled a parachute's ripcord, in an eruption of tremendous growth, the alien worm transformed into a massive, three-eyed, Jabba-the-Hut-sized slugbeast. It stretched open its cavernous

GULP The corpse-like doctor disappeared down the alien worm's gaping black hole of a maw. The explosion of air shot Elmer across the room. The room went black as his head bounced off a wall. He felt the cold tiles slam into his face as his cheek hit the floor.  Blink.

Blink blink. Blink blink blink. With the palm of his hand, Elmer smeared crusty saliva across his swollen face as he picked himself off from the floor. Surgical instruments lay scattered all around him. No one in the room but him. Elmer slowly straightened with a rusty bike-chain creak. Like the doctor said, he must've had a psychotic break. But everything was okay now. Everything was okay now. He had stopped hallucinating. No more annoying alien worm, no more massive slugbeast… But still an itchy ear… <Burp> The sounds was real quiet, like a belch in church.

"How the hell are you still in my ear?" Elmer grabbed a surgical pick which looked like a thin dagger from the floor. If the alien worm was gonna eat the damn doctor, he was going to have to spear the worm himself. With the sharp pick positioned at the entrance of his ear canal, like a fencer, Elmer delicately lunged the pick to the left. Then he angled the instrument and parried to the right. All the while the worm wiggled samba. Finally, he felt the squirmy body press up against the bottom of his ear canal. He made a desperate stab and—

"AAAAAAARRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!"

Elmer had punctured his eardrum. The horrific pain was like—obviously—an icepick to the head. He squeezed his eyes shut as he clapped his hand over the injured ear. Seizing the advantage, the worm swiftly slipped slimily through the rupture and burrowed into Elmer's brain.

 Staring directly ahead, in a zombie-like trance, Elmer monotonously murmured, "Tooda do, tooda dee, tooda doodle do," as he flashed the green laser light from the black-shingled roof of his house. The pattern of flashes, translated from alien Morse code, was an interstellar version of, "Come on in, the water is fine." Throughout the cosmos, an array of lights flashed back.

Satisfied its work was done, the alien worm gnawed further into Elmer's brain. Searching for a mate, it tunneled deeper, leaving chewed-out worm trails as it crawled high and low in dogged pursuit of the other, elusive, singing earworm.