gut-brain access

Harry’s dinner is a pile of dirt with rocks added for texture. He forgot his brain at a bus stop, it got wrecked, and he was lucky enough to receive a transplant.

His left brain’s been replaced by a pair of moles sewn into his right hemisphere, which is now a ball of worms. The moles would like to eat the worms, the intended dirt-munchers, and both make use of the soil. Spoonfuls of slowly digesting dirt prove irresistible to the moles. He burps as they dash around his intestines, dragging the worm-ball with them, and gags when buckets of rainwater follow the meal and prompt the worms to ascend. Harry requests a different configuration.

“Be grateful,” the surgeon scolds, “what’s there to fix?”

“Squeak meep,” Harry responds. The surgeon prescribes more dirt. 

Harry eats the extra soil but remains unfulfilled. The moles dig at his skull, agitated by something, and he coughs up half-eaten worms.

“You’re malnourished,” a different surgeon says. Patented, pharmaceutical-grade dirt is added to Harry’s regimen.

The addition gives him stomach aches. His brain, starving, gives in to its desires and begins to eat itself. He’s collapsed in bed when the last worm is devoured, the stiches snap, and both moles escape. One exits through his left ear, the other through his anus. Harry enters a vegetable state and dreams of sunlight and rain. 

His nervous system jerks him sideways to vomit soil and rid himself of rocks and mole droppings until his tract is cleared. His stomach lays an egg and hatches a new brain in his skull. Slightly more himself than before, Harry gets up, hides the dirt with a rug, and swallows uncooked pasta. His gut chews it up and spits it into baby’s mouth.