Cut Both Ends

When I was twelve years old, my friend Tracy and I decided to sacrifice a worm to the devil. It made sense at the time—the way strange childhood intentions seem to do. 

Our classmates had already dismissed us as freaks. Tracy liked to file her fingernails into sharp points and I was the acne-stricken weirdo who spent weeks at a time out of school visiting her epileptic brother in the hospital. 

My little brother had been having multiple brain surgeries in an attempt to stem the constant flow of tonic-clonic seizures that wracked his small body. Unfortunately, nothing seemed to be working. I spent seemingly endless days in hospital waiting rooms, disturbing images permanently imprinted in my mind: my brother’s blood-soaked gauze bandaged head, the swollen, bruised stitches that made his iodine-stained shaved scalp look like a warped baseball, the picture the surgeon showed us of his skull cracked open and his brain waiting for the defective piece to be plucked out.

Tracy had problems of her own, but I was too preoccupied with my own misfortunes to really know what they were. We spent our time together reading Stephen King novels and watching the goriest movies we could find. These fictional horrors couldn’t come close to the very real personal hells we lived in, so they provided adequate distraction.

We were having a sleepover. That afternoon as we brainstormed Halloween costumes, we became obsessed with the idea of dressing up as witch doctors. It occurred to us that this could afford us the opportunity for revenge against our bullies. We giggled over the idea of cutting out our classmates’ faces from the yearbook and pasting them onto little voodoo dolls. 

Somewhere between discussing where to get fabric and whose yearbook to deface, we weren’t just talking about costumes anymore. These had to be real voodoo dolls. We needed to be able to drive a pin deep into the plush and watch the pep squad writhe in pain during Social Studies. Tracy suggested it, perhaps trying to test me, and I doubled down on the “joke,” not wanting to seem weak or cowardly. 

Of course, the obvious roadblock stood in our way: how were we supposed to bewitch the dolls? Based on our stereotypical pop culture knowledge of what voodoo entailed, we figured we would need hair from our victims. Tracy brushed away any of my concerns, confident she could rip out a few strands during P.E. 

So, there we were, two little girls debating how to make enchanted effigies of our enemies. We consulted the horror stories that occupied most of our time. We needed something powerful and evil. As 7th graders, we knew fairytales and magic obviously didn’t exist, but based on my Southern Baptist upbringing, demons felt real enough. Where else to turn but to the devil himself? Tracy knew exactly what we needed to do to harness that power: sacrifice something to Satan. 

I didn’t know about this. God hadn’t exactly been there for us during my brother’s long illness. How many times had my family prayed for my brother to be healed, only for him to wake up from another operation, eyes rolling back into his head and drool slipping out of the corner of his mouth as he convulsed over and over again? I wasn’t sure if God existed, but I didn’t know if I was ready to test it.

Tracy started talking about what creatures were available in her backyard for us to capture. Squirrels? Chipmunks? Birds? My skin tingled with hot guilt as the reality of what we were about to attempt started to sink in. When you’re twelve and already short on friends, you will do pretty much anything to keep those that you have. I tried to dissuade Tracy’s enthusiastic planning by pointing out that we didn’t really have any way to catch these animals, and even if we did, how could we kill it without her parents finding out? 

We walked through the yard as we thought about how we might carry out this “voodoo” ritual. The idea had too much momentum now to abandon it. I suggested a bug—maybe one of the annoying cicadas that thrummed in the humid Arkansas October? I wouldn’t mind killing one of those. Tracy was adamant that it needed to be something better or Satan wouldn’t accept the sacrifice and then this whole thing would be a waste of time. 

It came to her as our tennis shoes sunk into the mud around the creek bed: a worm! Perhaps like me she realized that this sleepover was getting a little too intense, but neither of us wanted to be the one to back out. Sure, I’d accidentally chopped a worm in half with a garden spade before, how different could it be? 

We dug our fingers into the ground and quickly found our mark. It was fleshy, the color of a fresh bruise, and wriggled frantically in our hands. My first instinct was to name it, but I swallowed the thought down. I felt a rush of anxious energy and we hurried back to the house. Tracy handed me the worm and I cupped it in my palms, feeling it brushing dirt along my skin. I swore I could feel its heartbeat, though it was probably my own.

We gathered the few items we felt necessary for the task at hand, which included a candle, a lighter, and a pair of scissors, and locked ourselves in the bathroom. We kept the lights out and lit the candle—this was something to be completed in darkness. I felt short of breath as I watched Tracy’s features blink in and out of focus in the flamelight. 

“We have to cut off its head.”

I peered at the creature. It had stopped squirming so violently. In the candlelight it almost seemed to be pulsating. “Well which end is its head?”

“We’ll just cut off both ends to be safe.”

“And then what?”

“Burn them over the fire.”

It was as if we had forgotten we didn’t even have dolls there to curse, this was just a thing we had to do now. I tried to remind myself that I had speared worms onto fishhooks before, how was this different? I felt jittery. Everything I had ever learned told me this was wrong, but underneath it all ran a strange current. It came down to something incredibly simple: I wanted to do it because I wanted to see what would happen. In some strange way, confirmation of a great evil would mean confirmation of ultimate good. Maybe this would prove something to me.

I held the worm out to her. She took the scissors. With a decisive slice she cut about half an inch off one end, then the other. It sounded bizarrely like cutting through a wad of wet hair. What was left wriggled in my hand. I don’t know why I expected blood, so I was surprised when there wasn’t any. Do worms feel pain? Don’t they grow back? I watched her balance the two ends against the blade of the scissors and hold them up to the tiny flame.

We didn’t know what to say, so we just asked Satan to “grant us power.” I watched intently as the tiny pieces blackened and curled up. I thought I heard a squeal like steam escaping from a lobster. The shadows jumped against the wallpaper and fear crept in. I felt my scalp tighten and wondered what we had done. The earthy, burning stench hung around us, in silence but for the faint sizzle.

It seemed that we had crossed some sort of threshold. None of the horror media I had consumed had ever filled me with such immediate dread. I could tell that Tracy felt it too. We sat in silence for a long time.

Slowly it subsided. I don’t know what we were waiting for. I realized I was still clutching the rest of the worm’s body.

“What should I do with this?”

“I don’t know. Flush it.”

I flicked on the bathroom light and brushed the dead worm into the toilet. Tracy grabbed the scissors and knocked them against the side of the bowl, dropping the crispy worm bits in with it. They floated together pitifully. We flushed them down, washed our hands, and moved on to some other, perhaps more typical, sleepover activity.

No physical entity appeared in that bathroom. I don’t know that either of us really thought it would. Maybe we had imagined a hoarse voice whispering to us through the floor, or a vapory figure manifesting in the candle smoke. What happened instead was a rush of adrenaline and guilt-tinged fear. If nothing else, it took our minds off of epilepsy and divorce and bullies and the agony of childhood, at least for a moment, and evil aside, there is some good in that.

Carrie South is a writer, teacher, editor, and MFA student at the University of Central Arkansas. She lives in Little Rock with her husband and four parrots.