The King and his Worm

They look at me, the other inmates. A sense of not belonging pervades, which is not hard to pick up. I don’t belong, if truth be told. I’m not a criminal, unlike most of them, the worst of the worst. I didn’t steal or take bribes. I didn’t murder or rape or molest children. I didn’t sell, import, manufacture, distribute or even ingest illicit substances. I didn’t smuggle endangered animal parts for weird, exotic medicines or produce snuff movies where people bury their genitals in the guts of homeless migrants. Up until the day that I was arrested, I had never even committed so much as a traffic violation. I didn’t need to.

#

Six months he been here now, an’ still he don’t belong. You can sense it on him, everyone can. Like a bad smell, the sort that gets into your skin and can’t never be washed out, no matter how hard you try. It’s disgusting to look at him for it. It’s like he’s always scared. Like he’s found heself playing a game and he don’t know none of the rules, only he’s too ‘fraid to ask. Even if I din’t knows who he is and what he done, I’d want to bury my blade in him just for that stink. I got me an’ old spoon I been sharpening up nice just for him. He won’t last much longer. If the big booms don’t get him, then someone’s spoon will, sooner or later.

#

There are two new guards taking us to the field today. I don’t know their names, but they sure know who I am, or at least they think they do, from all the lies they’ve read. All the lies they’ve been told. ‘This way, your majesty,’ one of them says, shoving me in the back with the butt of his rifle so that I stumble forward, nearly tripping over the chains attached to my legs. It hurts whenever he does that, which is frequently, but I’m in so much pain already I barely even notice.

‘Try and ignore them,’ Celia said to me in a whisper, gently brushing her hand against mine before hurrying on ahead. She was taking a big risk talking to me, and I loved her for it. She had been my chef for fifteen years. She worked in my kitchen and lived in my house and was the closest thing to a friend I had left in the world. She used to cook these wonderful pastries whenever we were having a state dinner. They were so beautiful, like a work of art. And the taste. I had never tasted anything so good in all my days. I used to barely touch the main course, just to leave more room for those pastries. My stomach growled at the thought of it. I was so hungry. Everyone was. Not enough bread since the revolution for the citizens, so even less for the prisoners of society. And even less for me, the special case. I had never known hunger until now, this I have learnt. A hunger so deep and so wild, it’s all you can think about. A hunger so powerful, it is almost like I can feel my body digesting itself. What I wouldn’t give for one of those pastries now.

#

We get to the field and the screws push him again. They been pushing him all the way and he been taking it. He clever, not to react, the fucker. We been willing him to say something. To curse them or take a swing at one of the mean bastards so’s we can watch them beating on him. Some small fun at least before we start the endless task of digging out these fucking landmines, but there ain’t been nothing yet. He’ll get what’s coming to him though. They always does. 

#

The guards spread us out, ten, fifteen feet apart. They point to me and tell everyone that I had these mines buried during the war, so they all have me to thank now that we must dig them out. They hand us plastic shovels and a mine detector and tell us to get to work. I feel so faint I can barely stay standing up. Celia looks at me and smiles before taking delicate steps into the mine field. She was holding the long handle of the detector out in front of her with both hands, the flat face of it hovering just above the ground. She had the look of someone who was doing something as serine as fishing, rather than searching for high explosives. I said a short prayer for her to stay safe. I said a prayer for all of us. ‘Please God, if it be your will, bring us home safe again. Amen.’

I do the same and step into the field, treading so lightly I’m barely even breathing in case the added weight of the air in my lungs sets something off. I run the detector over the ground. My heart sinks whenever I hear one of the machines beep. I think that probably everyone’s does, it means someone’s going to have to start digging. I don’t have the strength anymore to dig, but dig I do, whenever I hear that beep. 

#

He has a beep and starts digging and I laughs. We’s all do, hoping that today’s the day this cunt gets what he deserves. He looks like he’s going to pass out as he tries to get the mine out. His hands are shaking and he probably would’ve shitted heself iffen he had anything to eat these last few days. It’s only a tank mine though, more’s the pity. Yous can hit one of those with a hammer and they don’t go off.

#

My hands tremble as I prise the mine out from the ground and, carefully as I can, begin to disarm it. My fingers are so numb from the damp and the cold, it’s almost impossible for me to unscrew the cap. A guard watches me from a distance, a look of indifference to my obvious pain. As the cap starts to loosen, I fantasise again about simply pressing on it with all my weight. I remember my wife and son, as we waited in that bunker, mortar and machine gun fire going off all around so that we could barely hear ourselves think, let alone talk to each other. My son, Daniel, he’s scared and he wraps his arms around me tight. He asks if everything is going to be okay and I tell him yes. But it isn’t going to be okay. It wasn’t okay. I watched the revolutionary army shoot him in the face and then shoot my wife in the head for good measure. I looked at them and asked them to shoot me too, but they just laughed and said that would be too good for me. That I was going to be kept alive so that I could suffer, just like I had made the people suffer for decades. They told me that I may wish for death, but that no matter what, no matter how much I begged, they would keep me alive so that I would know punishment. 

It was an explosion that rocked me from my maudlin self-pity. Then it was the screaming. 

#

The big boom sprayed dirt an’ blood an’ bits of bone all over the place. I ducked down so’s I didn’t get shit all over meself. We all did. But it didn’t work. Never does. Then I saws him. The stupid cunt, running towards that bitch of his who went an’ got her legs blown off. I saws him, running across the field like he could walk on water an’ weren’t going to get heself and weself all blown up to bits any second. I smashed my shovel into he legs an’ dropped him to the ground. Then I took my spoon and held it to he neck an’ I tolds him. “You fuckin’ cunts killed my son.” Tortured him an’ his wife ‘cause they got caught up in the fighting he did. So I stuck him. I stuck him with my fuckin’ spoon, right in the side. I was gonna stick the cunt again, but the guards came an’ dragged him away.

#

It didn’t hurt when the blade went in. I remember there being just a warm kind of feeling spreading out from my side. It felt almost nice. The only warmth I’d felt in I don’t know how long. But I could still hear the screaming. Celia’s screaming. I struggled and tried to push him off me, one of the lifers, I never did get his name, but he was too strong for me, and I was so weak now. I couldn’t move him. He whispered something in my ear about his family and how they were enemies of the state I’d had killed or something like that. He was going to stab me again, he said, and I kept struggling, desperate to try get away and help Celia. Then the guards came and hit him and dragged me away. Dragged me out of the field, away from Celia. I clawed my hands into the dirt, desperate to get to her, to try and help the last person who cared for me, ripping up clumps of wet, cold mud as I was pulled from the field. Then suddenly, I spotted a worm embedded in a piece of mud I had dug out with my hands. Despite everything, despite the sounds of my friend, Celia, dying, my stomach began to rumble and all I could focus on was that worm. I was so hungry. So hungry. I forgot about Celia and lunged for the worm.

#

Screws drag him an’ hit him with their rifles. Fair play to the cunt, he din’t go easy an’ took his blows. Then he finds somethin’ in the dirt an’ he’s trying to get a hold of it an’ put it in his gob. But them screws, they jus’ hit him an kick him until he knocks out an we’s laughing.

#

There was a funny taste in my mouth when I came to, like soil mixed with cough syrup. It took a moment before I realised where I was and that sadly, I was still alive. I was in the infirmary. A cold, slightly less damp hut at the edge of the camp where prisoners were mostly sent to die. Not me though. Never me. This is where they send me to get patched up, letting me recover just enough to keep me alive for more torment. My stomach growled again, and I thought about that worm. If only I had been able to save that worm.