ode to a mexican parasite

I have no dinner inside me. Just babies and bugs. An empty stomach all filled with disease and crippled offspring, rubbing their little fetal red eye as they inhale the fumes from my blood stream. I have not been eating well. I have been subsisting on uncooked chickpeas and cold custard. I haven’t left my bed in three days. Sometimes a tray appears on the bedside table with a small desert glass, ice cream sundae style, filled up with cold custard. I dip my sticky paws inside and munch it down. The drawers beneath my bed are filled with tinned chickpeas which I struggle to open using my teeth and fingernails. Sometimes I give up and munch on dried chickpeas instead, but this makes the babies angry. They beat little cripple fetus hands against my womb walls, and I go back to cutting my fingers on the cans.

There are kittens on the walls of my room. They streak big poop paw prints up the walls when I’m not looking. When I am looking, I tie them to the ground with bits of old string and wool unraveled from my jumpers. It doesn’t hold them for long though. They chew through the string and ping upwards like bubbles to the ceiling. Then they sit there, crosslegged on the roof giving me dirty looks. I don’t take shit from my roof kittens though. I throw the empty chickpea cans at their heads and scream expletives in rhyme. They’re quicker than I am though. The cans fall back down on my head more often than not. Once I knew a rat who chewed through a tennis ball in a drainpipe. If rats can do that, it’s no surprise my tethered kittens can break through the string. Sometimes I think about making a babushka cat trap. I would take the babushka doll that’s inside all the other babushka dolls, and cut it open. I would put the tiny kitten in the tiniest babushka doll, then put the tiniest babushka doll inside the next smallest babushka doll. Then I would take that doll, and fit it inside the next, and so on, until all the dolls were inside the big fat mamma of babushka dolls. Then I would see how long it took the kitten to chew its way out. I would do another babushka set with a rat, just for comparisons sake. I don’t know how good an idea it is though. I worry about the air inlets to babushka dolls. Perhaps it would be unsafe. Maybe the kitten would suffocate inside its babushka womb.

Like my babushka babies
Growing inside me

If there are babies inside me, at least they shall never be lonely. They will sit all day making polite conversation with the Mexican parasites that lived there before. And who will continue to live there forevermore. My doctor locks his door on my arrival and turns down the lights. My Chinese herbalist just cups me.

That’s no cure for parasites.

So I am rotten on the inside. Like a chestnut. Like a mouldy passionfruit. Like a bag of broken glass and dead spiders and the tops pulled from tomatoes. That is my stomach, with its yattering parasites, chattering away about global warming and hurricane warnings and house prices on the Carribbean coast. Why parasites would be concerned about house prices confuses me. They are happy and content with fecal matter and stomach linings as a place to hang their hat. But on they chatter, keeping me awake at night with their endless complaints.

I told my Chinese herbalist that I hadn’t slept in a week because my parasites were keeping me awake by discussing the nationalisation of the railways. I told her I was now too exhausted to leave my bed. I told her about the chickpeas and the kittens and my problems. She said
“Roll over. I need to cup your back.”