Crawling Worlds

A short story

Ralph had unwrapped the magnifying glass on his eighth birthday. His father’s rough hands had tousled youthful hair as he led him out into the rose-bordered garden.

“Let’s see you with it then.” His father’s face was aglow with the memories of when he’d caught his first tadpole, kept his first caterpillar.

With woollen socks and felt shorts scratching at his knees, he took a last look back at the sun-blanched house and his father’s eager smile. Ralph placed one unsteady foot in front of the other and bent towards the lawn.

He leapt back as if bitten. Between the luscious blades of soft grass there squirmed a host of leggy, incessant bodies twisting the earth beneath him like coiling rope.

He leant in again, to where his feet had just been. There again were the grotesque segmented bodies, chewing, curling, crawling. He moved across the garden like a tornado, touching ground again and again in the hope of, just once, finding it the clean sunny playground of before.

His father watched with pride.

Ralph’s skin began to crawl, the creatures he saw wormed through him, pattering from his feet up to his neck until he felt suffocated by the lies of the neatly manicured garden.

#

To the delight of his father everywhere they went, Ralph would bring his new glass, scanning the cracked masonry of the church, the steps of the bank, the meat behind the butcher’s display case.

“Such an interest!” The ladies would remark.

To Ralph, the world was made anew, not in glory but in a giant mass of shifting earth. His school was no longer solid form, it was all the tiny ugly singularities completing it. Holding the magnifying glass up to the brick he saw a vista of craggy mountains, the valleys between filled with the filth of ages. He saw the tiny crevices in which lurked more legs, more bodies waiting to move over him, his skin just another range to offer a mite a home.

When Ralph began to come home for tea red, raw and itching his father took him to the doctor.

“How old is he? Six, Seven?” the doctor asked.

“Eight.”

“Ah, yes. Out to play I imagine?”

Ralph’s father nodded.

“Not to worry. There’s some cream somewhere…

As his father discussed solutions with the doctor, Ralph removed his magnifying glass from its leather pouch and angled it at the doctor’s mouth where a damp tongue flicked between two plump slugs. He quietly began to scratch.

#

One bottle of cream disappeared, then another.

“I can’t understand it,” Ralph overheard his father on the phone one evening. “It’s getting worse.”

His father nodded into the receiver. “All the same, I think I’ll ask Sophie if she can take him for a week or so. Sea air will do him good.”

A shrug. “She won’t mind. I’ll write tomorrow.”

Ralph tiptoed back upstairs. It was a long time before he drifted off to sleep, and when he did his dreams filled with unrecognisable doors that opened into hair, nests, feathers, noses, legs.

#

“It’s not much but it’s yours while you’re here.”

Aunt Sophie opened the door to his neat little room, floral air freshener still lingering. “Although I expect you’ll be out amongst the rock pools most of the time, won’t you?”

Ralph smiled at her confident eyes while his shoulders curled inwards. He imagined what filled the spaces between the grains of sand, the sea’s spit in the wind. He could feel the bite amongst the beach. So instead, he just reddened his knees on the cliff-coloured carpet.

On the third day, Aunt Sophie looked at him from over a shepherd’s pie, “don’t you like going out?”

Ralph shook his head.

“I thought lads like you loved the seaside—climbing rocks, splashing about. No?” she waited for an answer.

“Is there anything else you’d like to do?” she said.

A shrug. Aunt Sophie paused. Ralph slipped off his chair and headed upstairs. She watched him already reaching for the magnifying glass as he left.

#

The next morning Aunt Sophie knocked at Ralph’s door.

“We’re going out.” she passed him a coat. “Don’t worry, not the beach,” she added in response to his cautious hands. “To the tower.”

Together they climbed to the very top, from where the lift stopped all the way up the iron stairs to the open-air platform. Aunt Sophie left Ralph to circle around, examining the fractured iron, as she breathed in the buffeting air.

When he returned, she smiled. “Pop your magnifying glass away for a minute, love. Let’s look out at the view.”

Ralph hesitated. Aunt Sophie crouched down to look at him at eye level.

“Just for a minute.” She gave his hand a squeeze.

They looked out together in silence. Aunt Sophie next to Ralph. She lifted him up for a moment so he could see just a little bit more, see what she saw. Her arms ached but his breath began to slow.

Below them the beach was busy with bodies, tiny and moving. A world of ants, shifting and building, busy amongst themselves. Ralph couldn’t see their faces, only legs, arms, motion, pushing through air and earth.

If he imagined blades of grass growing as tall as buildings between them, would it look any different to the world held in his magnifying glass? The crawling, bending bodies below were just more segmented forms. He looked up, half expecting to see a magnifying glass held above him with a giant eye that blinked out the sky. He folded his arms, seeking the comfort of his own elbows. Beneath skin and sinew something stirred, something shared with everything else.

As the cold wind scraped his cheeks, he smiled.

Welcome to the world.