Bughole

Billy Irving

I keep trying but it gets harder and harder.

I ran a small business at my childhood summer camp. The other boys would pay me a dollar, and in exchange I would swallow an earthworm whole. I knew just how to do it too, so that the worm would slide down quick and easy. I collected them from the creekbank in an old Styrofoam container, and I would use a crumpled-up water bottle to rinse each one off. The words worm shower were written in Sharpie on a strip of masking tape wrapped around the bottle’s midsection.

When it was time, I would tilt my chin straight up towards the canopy of sassafras leaves in their threefold variety and open my mouth as wide as it would go. The worm, held firmly between my thumb and index finger, would dangle just above my outstretched tongue. It wriggles and squirms for a while, then stops moving, just hanging there like a rope or a drip of honey stretching longer and longer until it sloughs off from the dipper. I would lower the worm until it’s past my lips and teeth, but I’d keep it suspended there, centered between my tonsils. I didn’t want them to touch any part of my mouth, and I definitely didn’t want to taste them. The idea was to separate my fingers precisely, making sure not to twist or swing the worm. When I was well-practiced, I could aim just right so that the worm would fall straight down my esophagus, all the way down into my stomach without touching anything.

Sometimes I would swallow the first one for free. This would get the kids in a frenzy, and they’d quickly form a line to shove their crummy dollar bills and loose change into my pockets. If they added a tip, I would let them pick out the worm I swallowed next, always choosing the fattest, nastiest ones. I filled my stomach up with worms in those hot months. If you cut me open, they might all spill out in a tangle on the ground. They might try to get back in. They might prefer it in there. Sometimes I feel bad thinking about them, but it must be kinda nice in a way, being eaten. Warm, like a womb. I don’t think worms are born in wombs. I don’t think they’re born from eggs, either. They slide out of each other, or branch apart, or they never die and are never born to begin with. 

In the park behind the middle school there was a place we called the bug hole. It was a pit about five foot deep, three foot wide, no indication of when it was dug out or why. No indication if it was dug out at all. I think it’s been there since the Earth was built, I think it’s where God stuck his finger. Or something like a finger. We called it the bug hole because it’s crawling with them. Beetles, centipedes, worms, spiders, long skinny things with no eyes, fat hairy things with lots of eyes. New things evolved out of that pit. From the wet, decaying leaves spawned undiscovered and unclassified combinations of thorax, abdomen, wing, sent up to our world to survive and multiply or die trying. 

It was a fun afterschool activity to dare each other to crawl in. 

We were young and small, so we might fit our whole bodies into the clay tube. We would bribe each other, beg each other, threaten each other to go in, to stand there for a minute, for just thirty seconds. Whenever they looked at me, I would swallow a worm instead. They’d leave me alone after that. Still, I too wanted to see what would happen if someone went in.

One September afternoon, I took twenty bucks I saved from a summer’s-worth of worm-swallowing and assembled thirty or so classmates around the hole. A taller, skinny boy named Noah stepped forward, his white polo shirt stained with chocolate milk, his hair in a blonde bowl that covered his eyelids and made him look dumb. He stood in front of the crowd and looked around with a soft smile in his wide mouth, subtly acknowledging the applause. I stepped down from my orange milkcrate podium, shook his hand, and closed his fingers around twenty singles. Noah then slipped off his shirt and shoes. He would bravely bear two minutes in the hole, half nude and barefoot.

Noah stepped up to the edge and looked down, his toes curling around the lip. There were no bugs visible that day. Some days you couldn’t see them, but you still knew they were there. He sighed, crouched, and placed his palms on the ledge next to his feet like some kind of cat. Then he stretched his hands farther apart to support his weight over the hole and slipped his body in so that it hung perfectly down the center without touching the sides. We watched him descend lower and lower until his toes pressed into the wet, leafy floor with an audible sop. He smiled and shifted his weight onto his heels. We all watched his head go down that extra half inch, dipping just below the edge of the hole.

Once his weight was completely on his feet, his face changed. The corners of his confident smile snapped down into a frown, then settled back somewhere in between. His eyebrows furrowed and relaxed. He didn’t look at any of us, he just reached his arms back out and pulled himself up onto the ledge, sitting there with his legs dangling over. He lifted his left foot onto his right knee and twisted it around a bit to get a good look at the sole.

We could all see it there. A long syringe protruded almost straight out from the cracked and calloused skin of his heel. Without saying anything, he squeezed the syringe between his thumb and index finger and pulled. I remember feeling worried, wondering whether he was squeezing too hard, whether it would pop and vomit its contents into his flesh like a tick. The needle slid out slowly from the tissue and left a little pinprick. He let his foot drop back into the pit and inspected the syringe, twisting it like he was trying to read something illegible etched into the glass. He turned his shoulders back to us, his face tightened with concern, his forehead asking us what to do. We were all just quiet, leaving a silence filled only by the sounds of the wind, the creek babbling over piles of bricks and abandoned office furniture, a dog barking, an airplane.

One of the younger kids blinked, sniffled, and took off sprinting into the woods. All of our heads tracked him, and after a few seconds, our bodies did too. We ran, all of us. We left Noah sitting there.

He was O.K. in the end.

Billy Irving is a writer of fiction from Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Professionally, he works as an editor in the medical communications field.