She Called It a Distinguished Affliction

by Joshua Vigil

Julien Tromeur

She thought maybe I’d contracted the disease on the plane. Planes were so stuffy, Margot said. The people so sick and leaky. I have a tailbone issue, she said, that I’m sure I got from some wild bacteria in the air. It’s like how cucumbers are sixteen inches nowadays. Bacteria sticks!

We were at work — we scooped up the trash inside airplanes between flights — when the captain interrupted. I’ll show you sixteen inches, he said, pumping his pelvis at Margot until he was humping her wooden peg leg. No worse than the pigs we cleaned up after.

His face was sloshed with sweat and he told me to wipe my sour look. He was right: I hated myself, and as much as I wanted to make that other people’s problem, it was of my own making. This was why I looked the way I did. Pinched.

My nose itched. I told Margot to come close, and did she want to see the disease in action? I scratched and scratched until a bundle of tiny persons tumbled out. See? I said.

I’ve never seen any disease like this, she said. Bacteria so big they could control the universe!

They are shaped like people, I said. So they are people. Don’t you see the arms and legs?

Can’t you hear them speak English?

You taught them language, so fast?

One is speaking Spanish, actually. Do you hear it say, Ayudame! Ayudame!

I only speak German, French, and Mandarin, you know this.

I told Margot how the disease started one day, the itch deep in my nose I scratched until small people dropped out of both nostrils. My home was now filled with them. Sometimes they grew into regular-sized adults that walked out the door, and not the size of snow peas. But, more often than not, they remained so tiny. I kept them in terrariums and could hear their cries from all corners of my apartment. I couldn’t sleep. I got noise complaints from the neighbors. Threats of eviction until I told the landlord they were my service animals.

Are people animals? Margot asked.

What would you call them? I said.

A nuisance.

***

At home, I told the mouse that lived inside my walls about my problem. He said, Why do you hate yourself?

I hate people more than I hate myself.

But you hate yourself so much. That’s a lot of hate.

How much I hate myself has nothing to do with my problems.

I think it’s the root of them.

You think it’s psychosomatic?

The mouse shook his whiskers. No, he said, I’ve seen the small people. I give them rides from time to time. They don’t taste like cheese though I’d say they smell like it.

Then: If you don’t want to get to the psychological root, how about you try the more physical one. By getting to your nose, I mean.

He suggested I contract syphilis and lose my nose that way.

***

Getting syphilis wasn’t so easy. I went to the red light district and had sex with hundreds of people over the course of many years. Always unprotected, all genders. By then, my house was filled with small people. And I hated people! But finally a hooker named Fuschia gave me syphilis and I left it untreated until my nose started to slowly dissolve. I stopped picking at it because there was nothing to pick at and by then people had — finally — stopped slipping out.

I wore a little metallic covering the captain loved to make fun of. He said I looked like I was from the future, not the past. I liked this. Because wasn’t time funny that way? My affliction picked any common history apart until I was left flying across centuries. Or something like that. I was of this time and not, and this made me feel more human. In my unbelonging I finally belonged. No nose and all.

***

I was forty-seven when I finally met someone with the same problem. Little people came plummeting out of his nose. I was collecting soiled cups and other greasy plastics onboard when I saw him cup a clump of people in his palm. When I told him he needed to get rid of his nose, he looked at me like I was crazy. But I love people! he said. Why would I do such a thing?

We’re not as alike as I thought we were.

You’ve kept a whole generation of people from living, and you’ve lost your nose in the process. How stupid you are! I love the company of others.

I am more human in my unbelonging, I explained. My bitterness makes us not so different.

Sir, he said, you’ve cut off your nose voluntarily. You deserve to be in the mental ward!

***

And so I took myself to the ward and the woman at the front desk said welcome. She said it all eager like. I told her not to touch me — she had her hand on my back — and she said, You’re one of those… Welcome home!

***

I went home and told the mouse what all had happened. He said he could have told me as much, he wasn’t surprised. We had a fine dinner, me and the mouse. Small people still bellowing from their terrariums. It was just another day. A Friday.

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Joshua Vigil is a writer and educator living in the Pioneer Valley. His writing has appeared in Hobart, Joyland, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. His chapbook Shapeshifter is out now from Bottlecap Press.