The Iteration of the Crow and the Worm
In this iteration of your visit, you are a crow. You are outside on the windowsill, one eye facing the room, watching, appearing not to, blocking the view and casting shade along the floor. I can tell, in a minute I will be scrambling under the dives of this crow; your talons will be swiping at my back. You brandish your wings in my direction; I brace for what is to come.
I am in the small room, the upstairs of our mother’s house. Wooden floor, four-paned window. The house is one room up, one room down—no more. Our mother is downstairs, a liquid in the bed, eyes roving skyward, mouth open like a bird’s. She empties and refills. The sound is like the ocean sucking at a plastic bag. My task is this: when the pitiful squall floods out of her and flies up through the floor, a chick’s chirp crying, “I am still here! Still hungering,” I will run downstairs, heart pounding, cross the driveway to the shed, and unlock the door to her feeding machine, now too big to fit inside the house. I will uncrank the reel and haul its long, bulky hose across the simmering gravel toward the house. Regardless of what ambush may await, I will haul its nozzle to her bedside and let her feed. Thus is my purpose fulfilled.
We are lucky, us three, that the house can accommodate both our mother and one of us. When the call came, how panicked you were. Your biggest terror threatening fruition: it might be you. How lucky we are, that when she reached the age of infirmity, there was one of us who could pivot, shift here and tend our mother’s life, that we did not have to pay out everything we had earned in our lifetimes. Or, we should feel so lucky, but you don’t. Instead, as I shepherd her to a peaceful, uneventful death, your visits become a screech, not relief, but a scream of rage, as if this casts you in a bad light, and you must make it any other way.
I am tired. This is our one thousand three hundred seventy-seventh iteration. Not that I’m counting. It seems we would have run out of iterations by now. Monkey and broom. Conductor and janitor. Packed city bus and grasshopper. I never know what I will wake up into, what snare you will have set for me, nor when the dreams will begin or end. I have delivered the feeding hose despite so many traps. One time I was a dog, a small dog, hairless, and not suited to cold weather, and I had to lay the hose across you as a blistering tundra. For dozens of subsequent iterations, I could still feel the burn of frostbite on the pads of my paws, though the paws themselves were long gone.
In this iteration I have become a worm. This makes my journey down the stairs more challenging. I usually think nothing of the stairs, but now I think of the dust clogging the ribs of my belly and think that I will sweep when I have a larger, more able body. The splinters in the wood are like daggers to avoid, and I think that I will sand and refinish. The drop from step to step is like a house I have to jump off. And I think…there is no way I could have prepared for this. But, as with every iteration, there’s a hidden weakness revealed that I can strengthen, a hidden advantage to the iteration that becomes apparent only as I move through it, and I am now more pliant, more accordionlike, more…dangly. It happens almost without conscious thought. An instinctual drive pushes me toward the edge of each cliff. At each precipice a part of me hangs into the air, stretching, almost waiting, and when I drop, my body is so light and pliable that I’m like a curling spring at the bottom, slowly unfurling to inch along the next plane.
At the downstairs room, you have arrived before me, now outside on the lower windowsill. One eye facing the room. Watching. Appearing not to. Blocking the light. But at the side window, not the one our mother can see. That is the convention, the one predictable element of each iteration. The shade must fall outside our mother’s line of sight. Always. Neither she nor anyone will witness these proceedings. There will be no collateral damage. Your objective is not to prevent the feed, only to exact the highest cost.
Our mother heaves, subsides, heaves, subsides. Eyes still ceilingward, slowly roaming, like reading a drifting text in the air. Pink letters, she said once, in the days when she still sat up for a plated meal, could pull a fresh nightgown over her head. She reported letters that couldn’t be made out. Or once, an image of a little girl, walking along the ceiling. Once, two shadowy figures standing at the foot of her bed, speaking about her in a language like the pink letters: visible, distinct, but inscrutable. But that was in the ago. She hasn’t spoken for some time; now it’s only the chirp. A call for food she need not chew.
I’ve got you, I’ve got you, is what I would say to the chirp as I pass, but in this iteration I have no mouth and no voice. Now, it’s just the slight squelching sound of my body rubbing along the floor. Can she hear it? Perhaps in this state, she can understand any language. I’ve got you, says my slither. I’ve got you.
The door to the outside is no obstacle. I slide under. Although, I think, this can be grounds for critique. The heating bill can be said to be too high. Fulfilling your need to know you would have done better (had you wanted to) and I must do only harm. But I can seal these cracks. Each iteration gives me new ideas. I am constantly learning. Even in iteration one thousand three hundred seventy-seven, I have not become too numb to adapt.
And I am certainly not too numb for adaptations of spite. Following the iteration in which you were the giant sequoia whose branches held the door shut and crisscrossed the windows like the slats of a confessional and I was a bank of fog, I bought a chain saw and trimmed every bush at the right time of year to spur growth. In the following iteration you were a tsunami, but I was thirteen hundred fifty cherry trees in full bloom, many of which survived.
This time around, the expanse of the driveway presents a unique challenge. From so low to the ground, the gravel looks like a labyrinth, and I do not know how long it will take to find my way. Also, from the iteration in which you were an eagle and I was the grass, I learned that you will have a tremendous spectrum of colors available to you, that you will easily spot any movement I make. But once again, this new iteration reveals that even gravel can be a shelter, and though I squirm between the stones, they can also protect my back, my non-existent shoulders, that burrowing half-buried through the soil beneath the gravel both cools me from the sun, and that I am so disguised in this state, when you swoop with talons bared, the tremor of your impact lands in the earth I’ve left inches behind, instead of within a hair’s breadth of my back.
The shed door is as gapped as the house’s, and sliding underneath, I think, this is why the mold has taken hold, because the rain comes through this previously unnoticed gap. I file this away on my list, every iteration a new perspective on what more can be done to improve our environment.
The feed hose, in its quiescent state, is flat. I have been unable to carry the shed key, and I’m in no position to reach the lock, so I will thread the hose under the door. It seems unlikely, an event possible only in a fable, but from this perspective, the rift under the door is as high as a rollup warehouse door. And as a worm, I feel unlimited patience. How long did it take me to cross the driveway? An afternoon? A week? I have no clear sense of time.
I feared I would falter, but…something about my wormness, my single-mindedness, allows me to push and push again, contracting and releasing different parts of myself as I shove. On the outside again, I can wriggle my way under the hose, hump my back to lock my ridges amongst its burlap stitches and urge it forward, millimeter by millimeter. Now I must traverse the gravel in this way, and I think, maybe after this, before the next iteration, I will pave, but for now perhaps I am sheltered from you beneath the hose.
Do you even know you are looking to harm me as you scrutinize the ground outside the house? Or are you composed entirely of instinct, the initial reason for the impulse of fury long submerged, nothing of you at all now but crow. Each iteration, I wonder the same thing. Do you see the iterations at all, as I do now, or are you still in the deep clutch of a never-ending dream? I know that in the beginning, I did not notice the iteration, and rode them as if they were just like any other dream. Like a sleepwalker, I ate without knowing I really ate, passed through doors I did not know existed in the real world, shat without knowing I shat, battled without realizing there was or had ever been anything beyond the immediate sweep of carnage. Only over time did I see the iterative nature of our days—overlays burying us deep, accumulating lore, imprinting us. In every iteration, I look for a sign of similar consciousness in you. But you never share a glance nor say a word. In each iteration, we compile such ingenuity, such tremendous (and growing) force, but I never see a sign of language by which we could speak. I think maybe your visits compound with a ferocity you perhaps neither see nor understand.
It is a lot of back and forth between the downstairs room, the passage under the house door, the driveway, the passage into the shed, the driveway, the swooping of the crow, the passage into the shed, the driveway, the talons piercing the hose, the floor of the first floor room of the house, the battering of the crow against the window at the side, the edge of the bed, the floor of the first room of the house, the battering crow, the edge of the bed, the hose inching along like my body, my body pushing here, pushing there. I am headless, all muscle, little brain, I can push for a long time. Until finally, the nozzle is beside our mother’s mouth.
From here, there’s only one last return to the shed, to flip the power switch, a pedal attached to the machine. Like a sewing treadle all it takes is a flick of the ankle, a simple drop of the foot. But I have no foot and I must…burrow beneath the nearby garden rake to crash it onto the switch. The wood of the shed floor is rotten with time and decay, and I think, again, how lucky I am: I could have waterproofed at any time, could have replanked at the first split or crack, but now I am eating, eating my way beneath the rake, eating and excreting as I go, like a magician’s hoop passing around a body hovering in the earth. This could not have been done on a pristine floor. I am so thankful! In time, even a reason for decay can become clear.
The rake handle plunges onto the pedal and the machine lurches to life. Here in the iterative dream, anything can be achieved. The feed glops through the hose, screeching like air out of a compressed balloon as it strains to pass under the door. A backlog builds, but enough gets through. Between iterations, I think, I can cut a pass-through in the door in the event that something of this iteration were to ever happen again.
Halfway between the shed and the house, it happens. I have left my tail exposed. I have no ears, but a shriek like the splitting of an atom hits the neurotransmitters in my skin, and then the sharp wind behind your wings rocks me as your talons find me, scraping my back. They say that worms feel no pain, that it’s nothing to skewer us on a hook, but I discover that’s not true. Chemicals surge as my body rushes to adapt to the wound. But more than that, I feel the new pain of the possibility of failure ahead. What, now, will become of our mother, if this time I cannot deliver the hose? Will the chirps come fewer and quieter, until there is neither sound nor breath? Or will you step in and squeeze the drops from the hose yourself, finally the savior you wished you could be? Or will you just fly away, a crow who got the worm, and then moved on, forgetting all else?
I am halfway beneath the hose, still squirming for further cover. I will not be ripped apart. I will complete my task. And then I feel a second slash, a part of me pierced through. I am rent. It’s over. I pull myself entirely under the hose, curl into a spiral. As if knowing I am finished, you retreat.
I breathe, or rather, I dissolve the air that touches me, absorbing it into my skin. And wait. And wait.
And then. The chirp. From inside. “I’m still here.” The rhythm an echo of some of her last spoken words. “Don’t leave me.” I twitch. I am still alive. Still attuned. My segments still contract. While something is left of me, I must progress. I regroup, push again from under the hose, and then I realize. Another gift. In this iteration I have five hearts, and you may shred one, but I will have four more.
As soon as I move, you screech through the air again. But this time I stay out of reach. At the door into the house, I must compress the hose a second time, and the lumps I see pumping toward the forward end of the hose are meagre indeed. As I inch up the blanket next to the hose, the sludge inside barely pulses upward with me.
On the bed, our mother’s eyes are fixed upward, the covers are thrown back. She fishtails from cold to hot in her aqua t-shirt, cut open in the back. Her body is truncated, a shadow in the bed, her skin drooping from her bones like melting snow, refusing to sweat.
You are battering your wings at the side window. In earlier iterations, I learned to keep the lights off in the house, so a bird is less likely to smash into the glass. If I paste patterns on the window, a bird might desist. But your crow is different, morphed, taller than the window, almost dwarfing the house itself, and more insistent, intentional, somehow immune to all my precautions.
Our mother is wheezing, choking, almost. How long has this entire procedure taken? Weeks? A month? She is thin like a nestling whose mother has left, limbs like leafless twigs, shuddering in winter. It can’t be possible, but this time, finally, have I taken too long? After all this, have I come too late? But this cannot be. No matter what path the iteration takes, I will get the feed to our mother. That’s the end. That’s what breaks the spell. What wakes me and sets me on my mounting tasks, the tasks which will bring us safety, more buoyant health. After this iteration, I think, I will purchase a second machine. After this iteration, I will build a second shed. After this iteration, I will dig a trench and lay an underground hose.
I push the hose the last few inches, and wait. The surge of feed. It doesn’t come. The engine in the shed vibrates my body through the hose, the machine whines in the background, barely pumping the feed through the compressions at the doors. At hose’s end, the drop I see inside will not fall. If I could encircle myself around this hose, I could constrict out that lingering drop like a snake.
Instead, the battering renews. The crashing of your face against the glass, the scrape of claws. But not the side window now, the window at the foot of the bed, directly in our mother’s line of sight. This is a fracture in the convention, which you cannot break. None of this can occur within her view. It is an impossibility. To see this will break her, our mother who lies rattling on the bed, mouth like a rift in the earth, clamoring. You are not to break the window glass. You are not able, and yet you do. And you are not to reach a claw across the room toward me, and yet you do. The thin front end of the hose is too narrow to hide under. And I am so tired now, with the tail end of me injured. The dream, the lucid dream, where I can bend the outcome, is collapsing. And the sharp blade of your beak grazes my back. I try to catch the eyes of our mother, to intercept the text in the air, but their roving has slowed. And I think, that’s why you can cross this boundary, her line of sight, because she is passing over, you think she can no longer see you do it. Detonating all pretense of peace, you will swoop in to rend me and alight at her side, as if to show you have always been here.
But, her breath, I can still hear it, the quiet edge of the ocean sucking at the shore, far below. Her mouth a black chasm, clamoring, asking, waiting, while your jaw opens toward my back. And maybe I still have a chance. Complete! Complete! I will myself. The hose is here at her mouth. Touching, pushing. I milk it with my body, but it gives nothing, unwilling as a spent teat.
And there it is, that tiny squall, a wind whistling that sounds like the cry of a bird. Up from the depths of our mother. “Don’t leave me.”
It happens almost without conscious thought. An instinctual drive pushes me toward the edge of the cliff. You screech and make your dive, but you are too late. At the precipice a part of me hangs into the air, stretching, dangling, and when I dive into our mother’s mouth, my body is light and pliable, so easily digestible, and as I plummet down the gorge, I curl and uncurl, reaching the lining of the gullet, to tickle, here, there, until I feel our mother’s throat, finally, contract, recoil. Swallow! Swallow! Live to take another bite! She swallows. One last mouthful of nourishment. I am descending, deflating, flattening to empty as the gorge constricts around me, and as I wait for the release, for my body to unfurl into the next plane, possibly my end for real this time, I wonder if you, in the body of the crow, if you, also, are disintegrating, and when one, or both of us, will wake.
Kiran Kaur Saini is a Punjabi-American writer of literary and speculative fiction. She is a winner of the Henfield Prize for Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Gulf Coast, Shenandoah, Pleiades, The Masters Review, Best Small Fictions, F&SF, and elsewhere.