At the Bottom of the Bottle

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

At the Bottom of the Bottle

 By Plot Roach

I love Nana Mary, but sometimes I wonder if I’m adopted. My family is filled with weirdoes and packrats. But Nana Mary takes it to the extreme.

She asked for my help to clean out her storage unit. Not because she was getting rid of everything in it, but because she was trying to get rid of some of her old collections of things in order to put more stuff into the already cramped unit.

So stacks of magazines, old videotapes, chipped planters and old cereal boxes made their way to the dumpster (amid much head shaking on my part and tearful farewells from Nana Mary), so that she could put in her new collection of things she had bought off of late night television.

I asked her why she just didn’t return the things back to their various manufacturers or else use them in her home, but all she would tell me was that they were worth something now, and would be doubly so ten years in the future.

Again, I shook my head and kept myself from arguing with Nana Mary. I had learned long ago that she had an answer for why she kept everything, even if she didn’t have a place for it. So while she was working her way through a box of old oatmeal cans, I pulled down a box of apothecary bottles.

Some of them were quite nice and in decent shape, their contents turned to a thick syrup or dried up entirely with age. I handed Nana Mary the box and asked what she had wanted to do with them. I advised her to put them up on an online auction or sell them to a collector here in town, since most still had their labels and seemed in almost pristine condition (considering most were probably older than Nana Mary herself).

"Oh, you go ahead and take them, dear. If you can find a use for them." She said, folding the cardboard top of the box in on itself to seal the box.

"But it’s your collection, Nana. Don’t you want to keep some of them?"

“No, dear." she said, unloading the contents of the car into the corner of the storage until we had just cleared. A microwave pasta maker and a screen-printing machine were the base of the next tower to her collecting insanity.

As I moved the box to the trunk of my car, thinking that I might stop by the local antique store on my way home to see if I might unload a few of the bottles and pay some bills in the process, the bottom of the box unfolded, and a few of the bottles snuck out and shattered onto the pavement.

I cursed my bad luck as I picked up the glass. Nana Mary murmured something about ‘spilled milk’ as I cut my hand on one of the glass pieces. A few minutes later, the glass was collected from the pavement, but the contents of the bottles were not. Most soaked into the hard blacktop, to become mystery stains that future renters would gawk at and wonder to its origin. But one of the bottles had held something that I had thought was a twig, until it moved.

"Nana, is that a worm?” I asked, nudging the twitching form with my shoe.

"Yes. I think it is, dear."

"Why would that be in a medicine bottle? And why is it still alive?"

"They used to use tapeworms in medicine, back in the day. Everything from weight los pills to helping sick people get their appetite back. Although some were used to test the proof of alcohol in a syrup.'

"Like some bottles of tequila, where the alcohol kills the worm?"

"Exactly. Though this one seemed to preserve the worm instead of killing it." Nana Mary looked down at the worm, which had stopped twitching and seemed to foam, sinking into the pavement with the rest of the ‘natural’ cures of the other bottles.

"Poor thing" she said. "To have been trapped in the bottle so long, only to die now."

"Yuck."

"Laugh it up little missy, but what one person calls icky, another calls medicine."

The day went faster after the worm incident. We cleared out half of the storage unit and Nana Mary  managed to fill only half the space we had cleared, vowing that she could now buy more things for her latest collection.

When I went home, I cleaned my wound and helped myself to a beer as I watched the news. Once the beer had kicked in and I didn’t feel as sore from my workout hefting boxes of useless items to the trash dumpster, I peeled off my clothes and headed for the shower. I noticed that the cut on my hand was almost healed and thanked my luck for at least one good thing coming my way.

The next morning, I headed off to work at my usual time, feeling a bit sluggish and attributing it to my hard work form the day before. By noon I suffered from stomach cramps and by the time my shift was over at the office, I felt as though I was going to faint from the pain. My whole body was riddled with cramps, and I had a massive fever. This was no common flu bug or food poisoning. I headed to the hospital and waited my turn, cursing a medical system that had yet to come up with a solution to waiting endlessly in line with other miserable patients.

The doctor took a urine sample, a few vials of blood and checked me up and down with a critical eye. When nothing helped, including injections for the pain, they decided to do a series of x-rays. That was when they found it. The worm that had died on the pavement when the box opened, breaking the bottle and exposing it to the elements, had somehow produced offspring. The children were now squirming around in my body, somehow invading me through the cut in my hand as I picked up the pieces of the broken bottle. The doctor had never seen anything like it, and said that traditional therapy would be of no use, since the parasites ran throughout my body. If I attacked them with poison, I might kill my own body in the process.

When I left the hospital that night I checked the box of bottles and pulled out the remnants of the worm’s bottle I had tossed back into the trunk only because I had thought to save the bottle’s label and frame it for my wall. So in retrospect, maybe I am as much of a packrat as they rest of my family. I looked at the faded label under the dying light of sunset and squinted to read its writing:

Dr. Simon’s miracle worm. The cure for whatever ails you: consumption, earache, fatigue, etc. Just keep the worm well fed and watch the wonder of nature’s custom cure.

The back of the bottle said to drink a glass of pure grain alcohol at least once daily in order to keep the worm performing at optimum conditions.

I shrugged and headed to my local grocery store, and picked up a mix of different liquors. The pain hit me so bad in line that I almost dropped the basket before I could finish paying for it. I began to drink a large bottle of vodka before I even left the parking lot, hoping that no police officers stopped me on the way home for driving under the influence.

I felt almost back to normal by the time I got back to my tiny little apartment. The contents of three more bottles made me feel as though I was a teenager again with endless energy and a feeling of immortality.

The next morning I did not have a hangover as I had expected, but suffered from something far worse. The crippling pain was back again, as was the fever. I quickly made myself a rum and Coke to take the edge off. I felt almost normal once I finished off the rum. Though I had imbibed more than enough alcohol than could be healthy for me, I should have felt ill or at least drunk. But the worms must have taken the toxins as well as the ‘buzz’. Only then did it occur to me that I would have to be in a constant state of inebriation in order to lead a normal life ever again. I would forever be an honest to goodness ‘functioning alcoholic’. The upside was that I would never suffer another illness, broken bone or fatigue again as well as I maintained a certain blood alcohol level. The bad news was that I hoped that I could afford the breath mints and the liquor bill.

I scan the newspaper every once in a while, hoping that one of the local breweries has an opening soon. I hear that the employees get to drink as much as they want while on the job. And I think I can use as much help as I can get.