She was lying on the couch, her eyes intently focused on the evening news when he walked through the door with a bag of salted peanuts and two crisp cold Cokes in his hand. She sat up as he took the vacant spot beside her and queued up the VCR. It was Friday night and that meant it was movie night. He passed her the salted peanuts. He knew she loved salted peanuts more than any other sodium packed treat and so she greedily cracked the bag open the instant the movie began. The cinematic music was punctuated by the cracking of peanut shells and the crunching of her teeth upon them. He was always slightly annoyed by the noises she made but it really began to aggravate him this particular night. He was just about to castigate her repulsive habit when she began gagging. She had just bit into her fifth nut when she detected a foul and rotten flavour and in the ensuing shock swallowed it. She hesitantly peered at its shell and screamed when she inspected its brother. Worried about her, he turned on the light and saw that the other nut was a putrid corpse green. “Can peanuts go bad?!” she asked in an urgent and terrified tone. He had never heard of peanuts turning green but he figured they could go bad so he affirmed her fear.
“I’m sure one peanut isn’t going to make you sick”, he added, worried that she would launch into another one of her hysteric melodramas if he did not dissuade her fears. He was not willing to entertain what he considered to be her neurotic delusions. They finished the movie anyhow, but she was feeling quite uneasy so she went straight to bed. He watched her toss around, sleeping, in disappointment. He had had other plans for the night and they were again dashed by that woman he chose to marry.
He woke up to the dulcet tones of his wife rhythmically vomiting into the ensuite toilet. He wanted to go in and hold her hair back and comfort her like a good husband, but the sight and smell of vomit disgusted him so he went back to sleep.
“I think I have a parasite or something” she weakly moaned to him as he woke up for a second time. He sighed, thinking it was too early in the morning to deal with his wife’s hypochondriasis. “There was something in that peanut, I’m sure,” she elaborated. He explained to her that it was doubtful one could get a parasite from a single peanut and rebuffed any concern or question she had to the contrary.
“It’s my body, I know if there’s something wrong with it!” she countered.
“Oh stop your hysterics! You threw up a single time. I’ve done worse after only a couple drinks!” he explained exasperatedly. She was adamant that her stomach and head were in excruciating pain and begged for him to take her to the hospital, but he ignored her theatrics and left for work. She tried to run after him but suddenly doubled over in pain. She lay on the floor, clutching her distended stomach, and howled. All that managed to come out was a hoarse whisper. She swore that she could feel something faintly squirming around in her abdominal cavity but there was nothing she could do about it except wait for her husband to return home.
By the time the front door opened later that day, the pain had gone away and she was feeling normal, if still somewhat bloated. She had managed to start cooking steaks for her loving husband on the stovetop and even harnessed enough energy to give him an exuberant hug as he crossed the threshold. “I see you’re feeling better. I told you it was nothing but aimless rumination,” he crooned patronizingly. She interpreted his condescension as loving concern, because that’s what she needed from him at the moment, and checked on the food.
She threw up again the next morning and the sensations that had been troubling her before returned, but she didn’t trouble her husband with it this time, knowing that he would just shoo it away as before. She went back to work that day even though the intermittent squirming sensation persisted. She figured whatever it was it would eventually work its way out of her system and became accustomed to it over the next month, before things started to get worse. The squirming became more constant and pronounced as did the bloating, to the point that she had trouble wearing the clothes she could before. She resented this fact, as it made her feel unattractive to her husband, whose opinion she respected above all else.
One night, after a particularly tenuous day at the office due and an inflammation of her condition, she discovered that her bloating had increased to the point where she gained five extra pounds. She had noticed her husband growing distant to her over the preceding days (ostensibly due to work) and realized that it must be due to the weight gained from the disease that he denied existed. She had always felt it her duty to look good for his behalf and believed that she was a failure to him and to herself if she were to appear unattractive. She obsessively spent the next two hours meticulously applying makeups of all variety to every crevice of her face in an attempt to make up for this perceived failure. All the time, the squirming began to intensify.
He opened the front door after coming home from work and went straight to the bathroom on account of a full bladder. The instant he stepped into the toilet he noticed that his wife was sprawled on the floor with a tube of lipstick pressed against her chin, tracing a line down from her mouth. He figured she had been so worried from that imaginary sickness she had been complaining about that she drank some wine to calm down and ended up overdoing it. He did what he needed to do and left her there. In actuality, she had collapsed from intense pain and the sickening squirming of whatever was in her bowels while applying her rouge and passed out when it became too unbearable.
When she came too and mustered all her strength she demanded that her husband take her to the hospital. She looked up at him with mascara running down from her doe eyes and in a mangled combination of a plea and a pitiful yelp entreated, “I don’t want this thing inside of me. Help me get it out.” He decided to humor her delusions and take her to the ER where they met up with a young and handsome male doctor.
The doctor sat in the exam room and diligently jotted notes on his clipboard while he listened to her talk about the pain, the squirming and the weight gain. After she finished talking, her husband entreated the doctor to talk to him outside.
“Listen, doctor. My wife is ridiculously prone to hysterics. I’ve always suspected that she has Munchausen’s or something. These new symptoms are certainly nothing to worry about,” he explained.
“Well, her symptoms and my examination so far seem to suggest that she could be privy to a parasitic infection, which is certainly something to worry about, so I may keep her back just to check on her, if that’s alright with you,” the doctor responded.
“Look doc, I respect your opinion but I’m very sure that it is nothing. We don’t have the kind of money to run crazy and unnecessary tests and I know my wife. She’s lonely and depressed sometimes and is just doing this for extra attention. Please believe me,” he pleaded. He then took out a business card for a dry-cleaning company in his wallet and handed it to the doctor, explaining that this was the cause for her “weight gain”. He spoke with such conviction and authority that the doctor decided to take him at his word.
“Alright, sir, I believe you. Patients with Munchausen’s are often very convincing and sometimes dose themselves to mimic symptoms, so let me test for toxins in case she has endangered herself and then you can take her home.”
The doctor came back into the exam room, did some tests and told his patient that he couldn’t find anything wrong with her and that it was all in her head. She continued to rebuke but the doctor explained that the pain was probably muscle cramps or something and that the squirming was a physical conversion of her fear of intestinal parasites.
“What about my weight gain?”, she enquired. The doctor fished out the dry-cleaning card. She protested that they had been doing her clothes for years with no issues and was indignant at all the explanations the doctors had given her for her ailment.
“I know what’s going on within my body and I have a parasite. It’s rude of you to dismiss all that I’ve said just because my husband claims I’m a crazy, hysterical woman and I refuse to leave this building until you respect me!” she said in an angry and tedious voice. In response, the doctor gave her some Lorazepam and her husband wheeled her to their car and brought her home. She took the next day off.
While her husband was at work that day, she had a mental breakdown. She was infected with something, and she knew it, but nobody seemed to respect her autonomy, nobody believed anything she said. She fell asleep into a fever dream where she found herself bound to her bed by her husband, who held a bag of salted peanuts in his hands. There was an intense scent of corpses in the room, so strong that her eyes watered. She reflexively tried to vomit but found that her throat was bent in a way where she could not, as if there was a funnel forced down her esophagus. Her mouth was clamped open to either side and she began to cry when she realized what was about to happen. Her husband turned the bag over and poured gallons upon gallons of green and putrid peanuts down her throat. She began to gag as she felt the peanuts forcing their way up, having run out of space in her small stomach. But it wasn’t peanuts that she felt coming back up, but a familiar squirming. Millions of small, grotesque nematodes began pooling out of her mouth and onto her cream duvet cover. They made a horrific shrill noise like a baby screaming that only intensified as more worms came out. She began to spew blood, worms and bile all over herself as her husband laughed and taunted her, claiming that there was nothing wrong with her, it was all in her head. Then she woke up.
She went into the bathroom and grabbed all her makeup, except for the lipstick, and threw it in the toilet, which she promptly flushed. She then grabbed the tube of lipstick and threw it as hard as humanly possible at the mirror. As the shards flew she saw a million different microscopic images of herself and she had turned into a hideous monster. She became convinced that the parasite was taking over her entire body and that she had to cull it before it overtook the rest of her life. She grabbed a knife but decided against performing surgery on herself for fear of accidentally severing an artery and bleeding out. Plus, she didn’t want to have to look at the parasite as she killed it. She racked her mind for anything she could do to kill the monster inside her. She was scared of doing anything that could cause permanent physical damage and disfigurement but started becoming desperate. She opened her closet and began to attack the clothes that no longer fit her with the knife, frustrated at her inability to kill the vile creature in her abdomen, futilely searching for a weapon to arm herself with. Until she saw it.
Her husband came home expecting the hug and kiss that his wife always welcomed him with but was puzzled to see that she was nowhere to be found. He called out for his wife several times before deciding to check all the rooms in the house for her. He started in the bathroom where he was shocked to see the floor blanketed in a million shards of glass, soaking in blood red water. He noticed that the liquid was oozing from the toilet, where he saw a collection of dyes and powders that had congealed in the pipes. He became quite angry and yelled for her to get her ass out there this instant. He yelled until he was hoarse before continuing to stomp throughout the house. He finally walked into his bedroom and saw a feminine shape lying on their bed. He walked in a little further and yelled at her. No response. She didn’t even flinch. He walked to the foot of the bed, where he felt wetness under his feet. He looked down and dropped his angry demeanour. He had stepped in a puddle of blood, oozing down from the bedpost. “Honey?!” he called concerningly. No response again. Then a glint of sunlight caught his eyes. There on the bed, in her right hand, was a blood encrusted coat hanger.