Short story
Brain worms by Claire Geare Illustrations by Monica Navarro
T
he worms that live in my brain make themselves known in plenty of ways: My bitten nails, pounding headaches and bad thoughts all go back to the nuisances in my frontal lobe slowly chipping away at my sanity. On good days, they operate as a copilot, a second-in-command. On the bad days, they usurp their leadership. Usually, they manifest as random urges — swerve the wheel, hit your head, breathe faster, faster, faster until you can’t breathe at all. Shake and cry when everything’s okay. Do anything but what you’re supposed to, and drag everyone down while you do it. For a while, I treated my brain like a beach full of forgotten land mines, carefully sidestepping myself to avoid remembering. I lived carefully and quietly, unwilling to try a new path for fear of striking the land mines littering my insides. I shrank to make room for all these worms planting all these mines, picked up from a lifetime of
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chaos — until I shrank so much I began to disappear. One thing about the worms: They’re very good at their job. Twisting middling memories and insignificant images into throat-closing remembrances, crafting perfectly wicked collages of the places in my mind I’d never dare visit. Asking me to keep them a secret, willing me not to tell. All part of their plan. See, there’s one important thing the worms didn’t share before barging into my brain: The more secret I kept them, the more control they would have over me. Tricky, those worms. Like a supervillain in the final moments of the film, it’s not until they’re sure they’ve won that they’ll reveal their greatest weakness. And last year, the worms were pretty sure they’d won. The first person I told was David. David told me his worms aren’t worms at all. Instead, he said his brain is run by a drill sergeant. Unforgiving and
