‘Ringworm’ by Clara Kumagai

She was a child who moved worms out of harm’s way and released flies caught in spider webs. She would shriek without shame at anyone who dared squelch a slug under boot. She had a loud voice.

One evening she watched Granny swing the limp body of a mouse into a wet field, and she screamed and screamed. She always sprang the traps with a spoon but had missed that one. Granny gave her a swift slap on the arse and an hour of exile. She was locked out of the house while Granny looked out at her from the kitchen window, vindictively eating jelly babies.

When the hour was up, she stormed back inside. ‘You shouldn’t’ve killed the mouse – he was only small!’

‘He et my things,’ Granny said.

‘But you just took my jelly babies, didn’t you?’ She stamped her foot at the injustice of the world.

‘I shouldn’t have done that? ’Cause they weren’t mine to eat?’

‘Yeah!’

‘That’s how I felt when the mouse et my cooking chocolate, except I didn’t do a poo in your self-raising flour, did I?’

She was forced to admit that no, her grandmother had not.

‘So you see. And I saved you some sweets.’

The child chomped on the remaining jelly babies – a red, an orange, a dusty green. She saw the sense in Granny’s words but it still wasn’t right, or fair, because Granny was bigger and stronger than the mouse in the first place, and now by eating the jelly babies she was somehow implicated in it all.

*

The next morning she passed the time by letting the calves suck on her fingers – they had a fierce vacuuming suckle. She felt the slick ridges of the roofs of their mouths and their warm tongue roughness.

‘Get out of that now, will ya?’ the uncle said. The calves had been taken from their mothers so they wouldn’t drink all their milk, and he was mixing them a white-watery formula substitute.

She wiped the thick calf saliva on the front of her jacket and stayed out of his way, patting the black and white dog. She had a tempestuous relationship with Patchy, who had once bitten her hand. Granny said it was because she’d just gotten a haircut and Patchy hadn’t recognised her. She didn’t want any more haircuts after that and so she and Patchy had undergone a slow reconciliation. Patchy licked some of the calf saliva from her hand and then loped away. She decided to go talk to the cows.

When she approached their field the cows ambled loosely towards her. She climbed the gate and leaned her chin on the top bar.

‘Don’t you miss your babies?’ she asked. ‘If you all went together you could probably get them out of the sheds.’

The cows looked at her placidly, flicking their long purpley-blue tongues into their wide wet nostrils

‘You don’t even care!’ she said.

They gave a bovine shrug and showed the whites of their eyes. The child hung on the gate, leaning back until her arms were stretched out, until she couldn’t go back any further.

*

A week later she developed ringworm on her face.

‘I’ve told you to stay away from them cows,’ Granny said. ‘They rub their arses off that gate.’

The child returned to the mirror again and again. The ringworm spread in a reddish-purple raised rash across her chin and halfway up one cheek. She couldn’t see the rings in it. It was more like whorls and spreading spirals, a crust of disjointed ripples on her still-water skin. She thought she looked like a monster. The cows didn’t look like this when they had it; they lost their hair in patches and were left grey and dry underneath. She was glad she hadn’t gotten the ringworm on her head because her hair would have fallen out and no doubt Patchy would have bitten her.

‘She can’t go to school like that!’ the uncle said.

‘You don’t get the ringworm from neglect.’ Granny stood at the range, salting and buttering things cooking in pots.

‘What other child in the school has it?’ The uncle was scouring his hands, scrubbing with the nail brush. ‘And what if another child gets it, we’d be in for it then!’

‘I can give it to other people?’ The child had enemies. This ringworm could herald a new age of germ warfare.

‘Don’t you touch anybody else while you’ve that on your face, d’ya hear me now?’ The uncle loomed over her.

She muttered a reluctant yes and Granny put a hand on her shoulder.

Granny put down plates with chicken and potatoes and soft, defeated cauliflower.

‘Have you heard from her at all?’ the uncle was saying. His voice sounded pillowy, filled with potato.

‘Last week.’

‘And where was she?’

‘Croatia, I think. One of those countries anyway.’

‘And the child? Who can lay claim to her?’

‘She’s no trouble.’

‘How’d you think she can travel round like that?’

The child looked at the cauliflower, speared on her fork like a tiny fainting tree.

‘How’d you think she’s affording it?’

‘It seems she meets nice people.’

‘Ha!’ The uncle’s laugh had no joy in it, only potato still.

She folded the phrase away – itseemsshemeetsnicepeople – and stowed it into a corner of her mind, thinking that one day she would know why the uncle had barked that laugh and why they all now sat in the heavy quiet.

*

Granny told her to get into the car.

‘Are you taking me to the doctor?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Granny drove erratically, punching the horn every time they went around a bend. She stopped outside a house that was low against the road. Granny knocked three times.

‘Come on in there,’ a voice said.

Granny pushed the child over the threshold first. There was a man sitting at the kitchen table, an old man not as old as Granny.

‘How are ya,’ Granny said in greeting.

‘Grand,’ he said.

‘She’s got the ringworm,’ Granny said.

‘I can see that.’ He stood up tall, with the curled shoulders of someone wanting to be a bit smaller. ‘I’ll wet the tea.’

Granny sat at the table. The house smelt like boiled things.

‘Do you think it’s going to rain?’ he asked, as the kettle steamed and clicked.

‘It’s always going to rain,’ Granny said.

‘Ah yeah,’ he sighed.

The man set a mug down in front of Granny and a glass of milk in front of the child, who drank it down in one go.

‘Like a suck calf,’ he said.

‘She loves the calves,’ Granny said. ‘Isn’t that where she caught it from.’

‘The poor calves,’ he said. ‘C’mere to me now, alanna.’

‘Go on.’ Granny pushed her forward.

She stepped up until she stood between his knees. He smiled at her and put his hands on her chin, her face small enough that his fingers covered her ears.

‘You’ll catch it,’ she warned him.

‘I won’t that,’ he said.

She gazed upwards. Over one of the man’s shoulders was a small TV on which the news played mutely. Over the other was the picture of the Sacred Heart, with Jesus in soft colors and smooth hair and one hand raised. The lamp below him shivered with a red light. Jesus’ heart was bare and ringed in thorns and she wondered did that hurt? The man was murmuring a prayer as he held her face and she looked at him and saw his eyes were closed. She closed her eyes, too, and let her head hang in his hands.

‘There now,’ he said when he stopped praying. He took his hands away and her face felt cold without them. ‘She’ll be grand.’

Granny’s face tightened and the child wondered if they were still talking about her. Granny laid two notes on the table.

‘I ask for nothing.’ He said it like a spell.

‘I know.’

‘Goodbye, suck calf.’

‘Bye.’

On the way back it started to rain.

*

The next day she was kept home from school. The day after that, while the child was jumping on Granny’s bed, the ringworm started to itch. On the third day, it began to flake off.

‘You can go back to school today,’ Granny said that morning.

‘Are you sure it’s not contagious?’ The uncle shook two teaspoons of sugar into his cereal bowl.

‘Three days and it heals.’

‘You took her to the seventh son, then,’ the uncle said.

‘What’s the seventh son?’ she asked.

‘I’ll tell you on the way to school,’ Granny said. ‘Finish your porridge.’

At lunchtime the teacher asked the child how she felt. “Are you taking any medicine for – for your face?’

‘No, Granny took me to the seventh son and he put his hands on me and he said a prayer to God and it’ll be gone tomorrow ‘cause he has the cure.’

Her poor teacher looked so confused, but then teachers rarely understood anything. ‘Ah … okay then. Go play now.’

The child ran off to chase the boys who had made fun of her before. They called her monster monster wormface! but she thrust her scabbed chin at them and they ran shrieking in defeat.

When Granny came to collect her after school, the teacher came out and asked if she could have a word.

She wandered about and lifted worms out of puddles to lay them on the sanctuary of grass. ‘You’ve to stay off the playground cause the boys’ll hurt you. I’m part worm now so I’ll move you but you should know for when I won’t be here.’ It was sound advice and she hoped the worms would take it on board.

Then Granny came striding from the school and grabbed the child’s arm. They walked home very fast. When they got into the house Granny slapped her across the face. ‘Don’t you go telling stories!’

‘But you told me he fixed it –’

‘Well, he didn’t! I put medicine from the doctor in your porridge and that’s what cured it! Did you know that?’

She shook her head. She didn’t know.

‘Well that’s what I did, that man did nothing. Do you hear me?’

She nodded.

‘Do you understand?’ Granny snarled.

‘Yes!’ she said and, now that she’d spoken, spilled into sobs.

Granny put her arms around her and held her close. ‘Hush, pet.’ She let her cry for a minute more. ‘Alright, stop now. Do you want a jelly baby?’

She did, indeed, want a jelly baby. As she ate them, the last of the ringworm fell off, detached by the slap and the tears.

*

She was no longer a child, really, when she watched her grandmother, neatly boxed, be lowered down and down. She thought of the worms in the wet earth beneath her smartly polished funeral shoes.

Afterwards, at the house, there were platters of triangular egg sandwiches and cans of beer provided by the uncle. The house stank. She went outside but there were no calves in the yard. It was the wrong time of year. Patchy was long gone but her daughter was black and white just as she had been and the succession was hardly noticeable.

She went to the gate that led to the field and crossed her arms to lean on the top bar. She put her face against her sleeves.

‘You needn’t worry.’

She looked around. A man, not as old as her grandmother, but old enough to die. His shoulders curled more, now.

‘Once I make it go it never comes back.’ He nodded at her and walked away.

She took her arms down and put her chin against the cold metal. She thought of her grandmother saying, itseemsshemeetsnicepeople, and she understood, just like that.

From issue #3: autumn/winter 2016

About the Author
Clara Kumagai’s writing has appeared in Room, Event, Megaphone, Icarus and The Stinging Fly. She is from Ireland, Canada, and Japan.