How the Heartworms Came to Petit Trou

It was during the time that the Major's wife was pregnant that the heartworms came. They swept along the ocean waves just like the Caribs and the Spanish had long centuries past, and they washed across the islands of the sea. They didn't come to Petit Trou at first, At first they hit the outer islands and the cities like San Gabriel and Guadeloupe. But everyone in Petit Trou had heard stories.

First, the dogs would go. The worms would creep into their mouths or noses while they slept. They'd travel down their arteries and curl up in the chambers of the heart, and there they'd mate and make more worms that curled up white and tiny in the ventricles and auricles and eat away the vena cava. They'd slide into the lungs and fill them up like water filling up a ship. And if the carcass of a dog were opened up, the worms would spill out like a pile of tiny skeletons. Outside, the dog would wince and curl into a ball as if it wanted to surround its heart and keep the pain from coming in. The pain, however, was already in. And there was nothing anyone could do. The dog would howl and squeal. He'd shake all over with convulsions. Then he'd die.

Although the world had reached the age of science, no one understood the heartworms—why they came or why they went beyond the dogs, which they had never done before. They got into the parakeets and myna birds. They got into the cats and donkeys and the cattle and the mules. They got into the howler monkeys. Then they reached the people. And no one knew a way to stop them.

In Petit Trou, the people heard of stories from the outside world, of people dying in the streets, of children's bellies popping open from the pressure of the worms. Whole families died and rotted in their homes. So many died that people had to push them all together into giant holes. So many died that people walked around and over them as if they were a stand of trees that some big wind had flattened to the ground.

One traveler told of what he saw in Mirimire.

"All dead," he told them. "Everyone except a baby girl. I found her crying in her hammock. Right beside her, on the floor, her mother lay there dead. And then the baby shook, and then her eyes looked up, and that was all."

He bowed his head.

"We're lucky," said the man.

"Shh," a woman said.

And she was right.

At first it seemed that Petit Trou was lucky. The heartworms stayed out for a while, and people started saying that the harbor's narrow opening was good for something after all. It kept the heartworms out. But not for long. The first sign came when children found a howler monkey staggering down an alley back of town. They said he staggered like a drunk and reached out to them, like he needed friends to hold him up. His long prehensile tail dragged useless on the ground. And then he grabbed he's heart and fell face forward. Doctor Barleyman himself conducted the autopsy. But everybody knew what he would find. The worms spilled out all over.

After that the people started burning clothes and bed sheets, throwing out old food and anything that might be tainted. The doctor told them "build the bonfires up and drive the humors out." But no one knew what humors brought the worms. They didn't understand at all. And then the people started dying. Not everybody died, not every animal, but many did. And that was all it took to break the town apart. The rich had houses in the hills, right by the tennis club. The governor, the mayor, the prosecutor, and the district engineer, the Colonel, even Doctor Barleyman, the Douglases and all the officers with gold and silver epaulettes, they moved into the hills.

Mrs. Douglas said at first she wouldn't go.

"We...