The Wyrms of &alon

While I was driving home in my hovercar, a middle-aged woman I didn’t know arrived home with a small rolling luggage trailing extended-handle-distance behind her. Her neighborhood wasn’t too far from mine. She lived in a very symmetrical house, quite fitting for an elementary school geometry teacher. The building was a charming new-old affair. A path of stepping stones bisected its somewhat patchy lawn, leading to the wooden door and its frosty glass panes. The house’s heptagonal windows looked on through half-open shutters, studying the lilacs and lavender that girded the walls. The plants hid the spots where the stucco had started to flake off. Bunches of the lavender’s stems were dead and in need of trimming. The lilacs’ leaves were stunted and discolored in places, though their flowers were as brilliant as ever; their petals spanned the spectrum from violet to pale blue.

The teacher’s name was Rose.

Rose was tired from her day at work, a day spent trying to teach students the same age as my son all about parallelograms. Parallelogram Day, as she called it, had gotten off to a rocky start despite her detailed lesson plan, though it got better after recess when Rose brought out her old, handmade wooden model to show the tykes that a parallelogram really was just a lazy rectangle—and that’s how you knew its area behaved in exactly the same way.

Rose dearly loved children, as had her husband, Stuart. He’d loved them so much that he’d left her after it became clear, years ago, that it hadn’t been his fault that she couldn’t bear him any children.

She stopped in the middle of the stepping stone path.

It still hurt to think about it. Terribly so.

Fortunately, Rose had Buddy. Buddy was a friend in the shape of a puppy she’d found in a box that some hapless someone had left by the side of the road. Buddy was better than Stuart in nearly every way. Yes, Buddy had an especially nervous disposition, and he couldn’t waltz with her in the living room by the light of the moon, but that hardly mattered to Rose. Buddy was good of a dog as anyone could expect. On most days, he would be a brown blur on the other side of the door, pawing at the frosty glass, all jitters and pit-pat patters, dying with anticipation as he waited for the sunset to bring her home to him once more.

Rose’s eyes rose to the door.

Buddy wasn’t here today.

That worried Rose—though, only slightly (he might be napping)—but, still, it was enough of a worry that Rose was distressed with impatience as she fumbled her fingers through her purse’s perfumed innards, feeling past her pocketbook’s coiled binding and pill containers’ sealed plastic boxes as she searched for the familiar dull edge of her nickel-plated house-keys. She didn’t have a key-card lock, or a scanner, or anything like that.

Opening the door, Rose stepped inside, tugging her rolling luggage in behind her. She wheeled it back and forth over the ragged straw doormat before pulling it over the threshold, not wanting to drag anything dirty or wet onto her shag carpeting with whatever might have clung onto the luggage wheels.

Buddy didn’t rush to her side. Rose didn’t hear claws click-clacking on the hardwood floor.

He must be sleeping. Maybe he slept all day?

He’d been out of it since yesterday evening. When she’d left this morning, he’d still been asleep—uncharacteristic behavior for a normally energetic dog.

Rose called out to Buddy with a tuneful lilt as she deposited her keys in the ceramic dish on the varnished wooden table pressed up flush against the wall.

“Buddy… I’m ho-ome.”

Taking off her coat, Rose hung it on the rack with one hand while she ran her other hand up the back of her neck and through her hair as she rolled her shoulders and shook her head. Her neck clicked from the motions.

“I continued trying to explain shapes to them,” she said. Rose ran all her lesson plans by Buddy, and always told him how they’d fared.

“It was rough going at first,” she continued, “but I think they’re starting to get it. Perimeter, area…”

The teacher slipped off her shoes and, bending over, placed them by the door.

“I’m just worried it’ll be hell all again once we get to angles and congruences.” She sighed. “But as long as it’s not as bad as last year’s class, I think we’ll manage.”

She smiled.

But still, Buddy was nowhere to be seen.

Rose pause.

“Buddy?”

The only answers were the silence of the shadows cast by the dying day.

Rose stepped down the one-step-stair leading to the living room, to her left. The curtains by the big window occluded the setting sun with their thickness. Molten light streamed in around the fringes.

“Buddy?” She called for him again.

No response.

Rose pursed her lips.

Buddy wasn’t on either of the couches, nor at his spot on the carpet between the table and the fireplace.

Rose doubled back to the hall, ready to turn up the stairs, thinking he might be on the bed, or, perhaps, in the blanket-lined basket he’d slept in as a puppy, when, hearing something and intuiting more, she steered herself over to the other side of the hall, through the dining room beyond and into the kitchen.

Light filtered through the backyard trees, casting irregular shadows and anti-shadows on the cabinets and the countertop as it came through the big window above the sink. Wayward paws had smeared leftover bits of dog food on the kitchen’s tiled floor. The satin metal finish on the lower cabinets was ruined, riddled with scratches and claw-marks.

Rose’s pulse quickened at the sight.

A low, soft groan wheezed from around the corner. The sound set acrid twinges a-blossom in the pit of her stomach.

Two steps forward, and Rose saw the trailing end of the contents of the garbage can in the service porch spilled out on the kitchen floor: wrappers, dregs of fat and bone, fruit rinds, moldy blueberries, a bloated can—tossed for having spoiled—and much more.

Rounding the stovetop—blocking the sun with her body, and casting everything before her in her shadow—Rose saw a trace of her dog. She caught the fur of Buddy’s back cresting over the edge of the overturned garbage can. Trash and ooze was splattered everywhere; Buddy had gorged himself on the refuse.

The dog’s breaths were ragged.

“Buddy…?”

Squatting down—her skirt spreading around her—Rose reached toward her beloved canine companion.

The dog moved in response. Shakily, he rose to his feet.

Buddy’s fur was a mess, beyond mangey. Between the scarce patches, the flesh had risen and thickened in dark, ropey tubercles, as if something beneath was trying to break free.

With a wretch, the animal staggered toward her. The motion startled Rose and made her step back, moving out of the way of the sun. And that was when she saw.

She saw his ears, one dangling from his skull, almost wholly peeled off from his flesh; the other, lying on the floor, nestled between the putrid remains of used coffee grains and broken eggshells. She saw his tongue, lolling out from between his jaws, its ends frayed like the bristles of a used toothbrush. And she saw his eyes, once glowing, innocent and happy, now turbid and ruptured, impaled from within by black filaments like purulent straw.