This is the third of a three-part series, the first of which appeared in the December 2025 issue.
Home Again
About a week after I got home I called my buddy Fred to tell him about the trip. I had already described the little motorized jitneys that buzzed all over the place, the dead bodies, and meeting the worm guy.
“Things were going really well. I was having a great time. But I must have eaten something bad. First, I got really sick, and then I started losing weight.”
“You know, Philly-boy, that guy slipped you a mickey.” Fred had a cold, so he sounded all nasally.
“Waddayamean, a mickey?”
“Alright not a mickey, cheese steak man, a worm, he slipped you one of those worms.” He coughed at the other end of the line. It was always like that with him, making fun of my name; Philly, Mr. Cream Cheese Head, or Feely, the horny guy who’s always trying to cop something on crowded Muni lines. I didn’t like it much.
“Okay, Friiieed, how’d he do that? I was with him the entire time,” I countered. But I knew he was right.
“Simple, hill-boy, he put a worm in your drink while you weren’t looking.” It sounded like he was rubbing his very congested nose. It made a wet, smacking sound. “You weren’t always looking right at him, Feel-face, were you?”
The water had seemed clear, but the worms were pretty small.
“I guess he could have done it when I was picking up that bottle cap.” A cap that’d turned out to be from a bottle of Kingfisher, completely worthless.
“Right-e-o. Anyway, I’ve got to go drain my nose in the sink. See ya around.”
“Not if I see you first,” I mumbled, but he was already gone.
As soon as I hung up the phone I started getting that creepy feeling, like hairballs, the insides of dog cages, and the worm guy’s room. He must have slipped me a worm. That’s why I was queasy so much, and my pants were so loose. I sat there, thinking it over, idly playing with a small pile of paper clips – I collect them too; you’d be surprised at the variety of paper clips available – and an idea took hold of me.
I got up and rummaged through my travel bag, still packed from the trip, and found the peanut can, plastic cap tightly clamped on. I peeled off the top, and there, inside, were maybe a couple dozen little black blobs. They must have multiplied, or divided, or something. I unwound a paper clip and poked at one of them. His wormy flesh shrank back, and he kind of curled up, though he was pretty curled already. I was in business.
The rest was easy. I went to Walgreens and bought an off-brand box of cold remedy, the plastic caplet type that has tiny medical jimmies inside. I set a few of the pills aside for Fred, and emptied the insides of the rest into a plastic baggy, in case I needed the medicine sometime. Then, I put the worms into the caplets. In addition to the one I’d poked, only one or two of them showed much signs of life. Still, I figured they’d do the trick.
The End of the Story
I’d been back from India almost three months. But no matter how much I ate, I kept losing weight. I’d eat huge stacks of pancakes, saturated with syrup and butter; Pop Tarts three times a day; surgery cereals. I wasn’t even that hungry, I was just disappearing.
I went to a doctor. I told him about my trip to India, and my weight loss, and how I thought I might’ve eaten a worm. I described the worms; black, blobby, small. He went over to his shelf and pulled out a fat book filled with slick paper and photographs and leafed through it.
“Did it look like this?” he asked.
He showed me a black and white snapshot of a worm lying next to a dime. The dime was bigger. The page opposite had a color photograph of someone’s arm with what looked like red worm tracks gouged from the wrist to the elbow.
“Yeah, that’s it. That’s the worm.” I said.
He gave me a bunch of pills and told me to take them twice a day with food for ten days. In not too long, he said, I should see the worm coming out in my ‘fecal matter.’ He told me it was a good thing I came when I did, because the worm probably wasn’t getting any smaller, and, given enough time, would eventually wrap around my insides and kill me.
I took the pills and began to gain weight. In fact, since I still ate piles of pre-packaged waffles, boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese, and large scoops of ice cream, I fattened up way past my pre-India poundage. I must’ve eaten so much to compensate for my worries. I was thinking about my customers: the fat lady with the baby; the teenagers; the guy who swallowed a bean bag chair. Even though I’d told each one of them to call, I’d only heard from the businessman, who’d come by with a smile on his face about a month after buying the remedy. He looked about the same to me but insisted he’d lost ten pounds. I gave him some of the pills I’d picked up from the doctor and told him they were even more effective than the last batch.
I couldn’t sleep at night, and when I did, I’d dream about the burning bones and floating bodies I’d seen in India, and wake up sweaty and scared. Maybe my worms were sitting in my customers’ stomachs getting bigger and bigger, until finally they’d fill everything inside, and come bursting out of their stomachs, like Alien, or oozing out of their ears and noses, like that episode of Fringe.
I posted another set of signs around the neighborhood. I didn’t want to admit liability or anything, so I wrote, “Fresh from the Orient – even better weight loss remedy. If you liked the last batch, you’ll love this one. Free to all previous customers.” I figured once I got them in the door, I’d give them some of the anti-worm pills the doctor gave me, and, viola, good-bye worms.
Over the next few weeks all but two of my customers reappeared. The skinny teenagers complained that they hadn’t lost any weight and wanted their money back. I gave it to them. The middle-aged woman told me her weight hadn’t changed, but thought it was because she’d been eating more, and didn’t ask for a refund.
Neither the fat woman with the baby or the woman who looked like my sister showed. I didn’t leave the house, in case one of them dropped by. I watched a lot of The Office, Friends, and Two and a Half Men re-runs, ate, and got fatter and fatter. Maybe the worms had already killed my remaining two customers. I scanned the Internet for notices of news about premature, worm-induced, deaths, but there weren’t any, or at least they weren’t web-worthy.
Fred came over now and again, but he bugged me with his “Phil, the size of Philadelphia” jokes. I tried calling my sister, but her work told me that she was on assignment somewhere, and she’d changed her home telephone to an unlisted number. I guess she must have been getting a lot of crank calls. I didn’t talk to anybody for days, and weeks passed during which the only human contact I had was with the guy at the corner grocery store.
The rainy season came. I’d sit by the window, and bet on which raindrop would slide down to the bottom of the glass first, a game my sister and I played when we were little.
I was re-sorting my miniature liquor bottle collection, trying to match the color of the labels to the color of my bottle caps, when there was a knock on the door, and in came the lady with the baby. She was wearing a huge raincoat, shining with tiny drops, that seemed to be made out of the same Glad bag-bubble wrap material she wore the first time I met her, but with a slightly different shade of blue. I couldn’t believe it was her. I jumped up, grabbed her, and gave her a hug.
“You’re still fat! You’re still fat!” I yelped.
“So are you.”
She pushed me away and looked me up and down, like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing, and what she was seeing wasn’t good. I’d gotten wet when I hugged her, so I wiped off my shirt, unfolded the metal chair, and indicated she should sit down.
“It’s great to see you,” I said.
I bent over her baby carriage, which was damp. “And here’s the little one.”
I pulled back the blanket. Still, beady eyes stared up at me. I jolted away, still clutching the blanket.
“That’s not a baby. That’s, that’s one of those baby-wet-her-pants dolls, from the 1980s.”
She grunted. “Yeah, well those weren’t weight loss pills you gave me, neither were they?”
She shook her head sideways. I did the same.
“But, why do you push around a doll in a carriage, and tell people it’s your baby?”
“Why do you sell ‘Oriental medicines’ that don’t do a damn bit of good?” She sighed, heavily.
“You try being fat, single, and in your forties.” She eyed me over. “On second thought, maybe you already have. Now give me my money back.”
She snatched the blanket out of my hands and tucked it back over her baby.
I went to the desk and pulled out the same crumpled notes she’d originally given me; I’d kept them because they were the first dollars I’d made during my short-lived weight loss business.
“Here.” She took the money and heaved herself out of the chair.
“Hmmuph.” she said and gave me one last look. Then she turned around, and pushed the baby carriage out of my apartment.
I sat at the edge of the desk. Almost all of my clients were now accounted for, and none of them had experienced the kind of weight loss I imagined a “killer worm” would cause. But I hadn’t heard from the woman who looked like my sister. Maybe she was sick, or even dead, which would mean I killed her. I fished the rest of the worm caplets from the desk drawer and opened them up. Inside each one was a dried-out black thing resembling a tiny raisin. Except the last one. It contained a curled-up blob that, when I poked it with a paper clip, curled up even tighter. I poured myself a glass of water and drank it down.
I walked over to the window. It’d started to rain again, and I watched two drops as they raced to the bottom. If my drop won, I bet to myself, my sister would call. Keeping my eyes on each bead of water, I leaned against the windowsill and silently urged my drop to go faster.
This story was first published in the View’s February 2019 issue.