Feed Drop - The Wrong Station

Speaker 1 Good evening, gentlemen and gentle ladies of hell. We're pleased to announce that season two of The Gentlemen from Hell will premiere on January 7th, 2026.

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Speaker 10 Greetings, gentlemen and gentle ladies from hell. Today, we'd like to introduce to you one of our personal favorite podcasts.
The Wrong Station is a horror anthology podcast.

Speaker 10 Each episode is an original story that stands alone, but all are unified by a pervading sense of wrongness.

Speaker 10 Stories span a wide selection of genres and settings. If you like the Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, or horror short story collections, Wrong Station is for you.

Speaker 10 We're big fans of their show, and we wanted to help them celebrate a major milestone. Wrong Station is currently celebrating their 10th season and their 10th year on the air.

Speaker 10 You can listen to Wrong Station on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever else you listen to your favorite horror podcasts. And as always, enjoy the episode.

Speaker 8 Wonder-working power in the Russia.

Speaker 6 Incredible as they seem, are not the results of massive stereotypes.

Speaker 11 You may wish to adjust the dial

Speaker 11 you're currently tuned into

Speaker 11 the wrong station.

Speaker 8 I have always been a very clean person.

Speaker 8 I have always lived a very clean life.

Speaker 8 I have always been infected with a horror and fascination with anything dirty, unclean.

Speaker 8 It has been so foreign to me, you understand.

Speaker 8 When I was ten years old, I loved, like most girls at some point, horses.

Speaker 8 My grandparents had owned a farm. It was in my blood, I assumed.
I read every story about horses in the school library.

Speaker 8 And then, having convinced myself I was going to become a veterinarian, I signed out an old veterinary medicine textbook and sat reading it on the grey carpeted bleachers at the back of the stacks, underneath the white fluorescence.

Speaker 8 This was where I first discovered the worms.

Speaker 8 In the middle of that book, a section of full color plate photographs stood out. I turned to them eagerly, imagining images of horses in the full burnish of restored health.

Speaker 8 What I found instead was a cornucopia of horror, life-changing for any ten-year-old girl to witness.

Speaker 8 I was already crying by the second page, but unable to stop myself from flipping all the way through.

Speaker 8 On the final plate, I discovered a horror beyond even those of full birth and mud fever.

Speaker 8 Periscaris Equorum, horse roundworm.

Speaker 8 The photograph, in its drab drab 1970s shades of green and brown and red, was of a dead horse lying on its side in the middle of a field.

Speaker 8 A neat square aperture had been cut into the horse's swollen belly, and through this red lacuna a length of intestine had been pulled.

Speaker 8 Someone was holding this length of intestine like a bouquet of flowers.

Speaker 8 They weren't wearing any medical gloves.

Speaker 8 And just beyond the end of their grip, the intestine had been sliced neatly open so that it looked like nothing so much as an overstuffed wrap.

Speaker 8 Now the reason why I say overstuffed is because this particular stretch of intestine had been completely blocked off. And what it had been blocked off by was worms.

Speaker 8 Hundreds of them.

Speaker 8 I mean quite literally hundreds, so many that they had all become interwrithed and tangled together into an impenetrable ball of plug, a bolus of thick white worms, each the thickness of a pen and the length of a ruler, their heads pointed and featureless, their bodies creamy and elastic,

Speaker 8 perfectly, surprisingly clean.

Speaker 8 I cannot express my revulsion to you. The horror of a horse-crazed girl who had rarely so much as had to wash her own dishes before.

Speaker 8 I screamed, wouldn't stop screaming, even after the librarian had taken the book out of my hands and walked me up to the school office where a kindly woman I'd never met tried to soothe me until my parents arrived to bring me home.

Speaker 8 I have never forgotten that photograph. I can close my eyes now and conjure it up.

Speaker 8 I can do this at any moment of the day or night,

Speaker 8 and shall be able to until I die.

Speaker 8 After this experience, as one might imagine, I I lost all interest in both horses and veterinary practice.

Speaker 8 And yet, as I mentioned earlier, I have ever been possessed by a slight and sick fascination with the unclean.

Speaker 8 And many is the night in my life when I've risen from my bed at some dark hour and drifted to the bookcase or desktop to find my attention repulsed and enthralled by some encyclopedia page detailing the symptoms of botfly infestation, for example, or the pus-drinking ministrations given by St.

Speaker 8 Catherine of Siena to her fellow nuns who found themselves ill with cancer of the breast.

Speaker 8 And it was because of this unorthodox habit that, many years later, I, the last person you would expect to have an in-depth knowledge of neglected tropical diseases, was able to recognize the symptoms of one when it cropped up unexpectedly in my own flesh.

Speaker 8 Perhaps you cannot tell this from my current state. But up until a few years ago, I was a prosperous woman living in a prosperous neighborhood of Toronto.

Speaker 8 My husband in finance, I with a well-funded position on the board of our local private school.

Speaker 8 You can imagine our life, conspicuously clean, our children neatly groomed at the school on whose board I sat. Our workplaces immaculate.
Our home.

Speaker 8 I must have fired half the house cleaners in Toronto for failing to keep the place to a standard with which my mother would have considered appropriate.

Speaker 8 We spent our holidays on pristine ski slopes and immaculate greens where every living thing had been burned from the grass by chemical stringents.

Speaker 8 We were clean.

Speaker 8 Our lives were clean. Do you understand?

Speaker 8 And then one day, I came down with a fever.

Speaker 8 Out to lunch, when it hit?

Speaker 8 On the rooftop patio at Cagano in Summerhill. A summer view over the treetops and glimpses of red brick.
The gentle yellow of the old train station clock tower framed against a porcelain blue sky.

Speaker 8 Margot Fitzgerald was across from me, going on and on about how her husband knew the MPP, and maybe we could get him for the school's annual fundraising gala.

Speaker 8 Then, out of nowhere, the breezy patio felt suddenly very hot to me, and my lips numbed to the touch of the shrimp in my scampia la cantantina.

Speaker 8 Oh God, I thought to myself, this can't be. For right from the first moment, you understand, I knew exactly what the ailment was.

Speaker 8 Are you all right? Margot asked. A little frown wrinkled her brow.
I had to fight down the urge to cough. You're looking a little pink.

Speaker 8 No, no, I told myself. This can't be what it is.
What I think it is couldn't possibly be what it is. People like us.
We don't get those kinds of illnesses.

Speaker 8 Just the heat, Margot. A bit of pepper on the shrimp.

Speaker 8 I changed the subject. Did I ever tell you about my grandmother? By that point I'm certain it was quite clear I was in significant discomfort.

Speaker 8 I could feel my face swelling and reddening, my throat cinching shut like the waist of a summer dress.

Speaker 8 But if it was obvious, then Margot had the good breeding not to draw attention to the fact.

Speaker 8 Yes, a little, she said. Didn't she come here during the war? Before the war.
I could hear the strain in my own words. The First War.
Spent the first winter in a sawed hut made from an upturned wagon.

Speaker 8 In Saskatchewan, imagine.

Speaker 8 Margot attempted to laugh, but her smile faltered as I coughed wetly into a napkin.

Speaker 8 Anyway, I had always thought they were farmers on that side and always had been. But when I was speaking to my great aunt before she died, she told me, no, no.

Speaker 8 Speaking was an act of enormous effort at this point.

Speaker 8 Her father and uncle had been people of substance back in the old country, engineers.

Speaker 8 And of course, being connected people, they

Speaker 8 excuse me,

Speaker 8 were able to get out before the war. And they came here because of the promise of free land, since back home land meant wealth, though here it just meant Saskatchewan.

Speaker 8 Anyway, you'll never believe how the old girl put it. We weren't peasants, darling.
Just like that. We weren't peasants.

Speaker 8 Here I interrupted myself with another bout of coughing, much worse than before. People turned from the other tables to look.
Humiliating.

Speaker 8 And as I forced the coughing to subside, as feared, I found a little bit of pink in my sputum on the napkin. I stared at it for a moment, and then swallowed and folded up the cloth and went on.

Speaker 8 And that's why my mother and grandmother were always so insistent on things being clean. They were used to having people do it for them, you see.

Speaker 8 And so they thought it set them apart from the other farm wives on the South Saskatchewan.

Speaker 8 Margot tells me at this point I was leaning heavily on the table, my breath rasping, my words all but incomprehensible. Are you sure you're all right? she said.
Of course, darling.

Speaker 8 And that's when I fainted.

Speaker 8 Well, a highly embarrassing little incident, and I had to spend the next few weeks at home recovering. Flu-like symptoms.
Cough, fever, abdominal discomfort. Like a pebble in my guts.

Speaker 8 My family avoided me. They must have thought I was hiding COVID from them again.

Speaker 8 When of course, I knew better. I would have welcomed COVID at that point.
Everyone had had it. There was nothing unclean about it anymore.
Nothing Nothing embarrassing.

Speaker 8 But what I knew, and nobody else did, least of all my doctor, was what was really going on. Those long days as I lay in the bath for hour after hour after hour, what was happening was this.

Speaker 8 Somewhere deep inside me, eggs had hatched. The larvae had seeped from my intestines to my bloodstream, and thence my lungs, causing the coughing chest pain.

Speaker 8 But I knew, if I just waited it out, the symptoms would pass. The larvae, coughed up into my esophagus, would find their way back down to my small intestine and finish out their life.
A few weeks?

Speaker 8 And then back to blissful denial. Nothing different about my life but the shellfish allergy.

Speaker 8 And yet, you have to understand, I was of two minds about the whole thing. One part of me knew for a fact, a fact, that I had worms.

Speaker 8 Ascariasis, my worst fear realized, the list of symptoms committed to memory for well past thirty years.

Speaker 8 The other part of me, however, knew for a fact that I did not have asceriasis. A fact.

Speaker 8 Because it was, in fact, impossible for me. Impossible for someone like me to have worms.

Speaker 8 I had nothing but a cold or COVID. All I had to do was wait, and the symptoms would pass.

Speaker 8 And so I waited. And then they passed, as predicted.
I breathed a sigh of relief and then quickly forgot about the whole affair.

Speaker 8 Until three months later, when I found a worm in my stool.

Speaker 8 Have you ever felt something slither out of you?

Speaker 8 Cold

Speaker 8 and smooth like liquid ceramic.

Speaker 8 The first time it happened to me, I flushed the toilet immediately. Didn't even dare to look.

Speaker 8 Because if I didn't look, then it couldn't be true.

Speaker 8 And I'll admit it, the second time I felt that cold ceramic slither, I did just the same thing.

Speaker 8 Only on the third occasion did the dark imaginings of my own mind metastasize so abhorrently as to outweigh the dreadful heft of any true sight.

Speaker 8 And so, the third time I felt that slither,

Speaker 8 after sitting with fists clenched and hot tears sliding silent down my cheeks, I dared to stand and turn

Speaker 8 and look at what I had birthed.

Speaker 8 There I found him,

Speaker 8 curling there in the basin full of water and my cloudy stools.

Speaker 8 He had grown to a length of about twenty-four centimeters, and a width of about half that of my little finger. He had grown to this size by feeding off my food and the blood of my intestinal wall.

Speaker 8 It was

Speaker 8 fascinating to look at him.

Speaker 8 Undoubtedly, it was horrible. But to have seen so many things like him before on so many pages, and then to see him in real life

Speaker 8 brought a certain thrill of recognition.

Speaker 8 A strange satisfaction to know one's worst fears confirmed.

Speaker 8 To be

Speaker 8 one's worst fears confirmed.

Speaker 8 Another strange sensation.

Speaker 8 Didn't I use the word birthed a moment ago?

Speaker 8 Well, perhaps that was no accident of language. In a very real sense I had made him.

Speaker 8 And I felt at the sight of him floating there a little twinge of the vague maternal feeling I had once felt upon holding my own children.

Speaker 8 And in a perverse little way, I knew more about him than I did about my own children. There were no encyclopedia pages on my children's lives to browse in some dark hour of the night.

Speaker 8 But him.

Speaker 8 Well,

Speaker 8 for example, I knew it was a him because I knew the female Ascarisworms were larger, almost half the length of their body, vulva. I knew there must be females inside me too.

Speaker 8 The males and females copulating within me, writhing up and down, injecting one another with needle phalluses, spurting gametes that didn't swim but crawled.

Speaker 8 In my own way, I was a participant in this process.

Speaker 8 Mother and lover both.

Speaker 8 I shared a dry little laugh with the the worm at that thought.

Speaker 8 I said aloud that it was the most action I'd had in years.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 8 can I confess something to you?

Speaker 8 That the thought, however horrible it was, brought a little twinge of...

Speaker 8 intrigue to my mind?

Speaker 8 A little flush to my neck?

Speaker 8 There was a secret world inside me, a world as different as could be imagined from this stale round of restaurant openings and private school fundraisers.

Speaker 8 And so I made a decision in that moment. Perhaps it was the wrong decision, but it felt right then, like something supremely, divinely right.

Speaker 8 I left the bowl unflushed and closed the bathroom door behind me. Returned a few minutes later with a jar and a pair of kitchen tongs.

Speaker 8 I fished him, my strange, self incested child from the water, and though his slow, insistent writhing and churn sickened me, I managed to get him into the jar,

Speaker 8 added water, and a little fecal matter for him to feed on, if he could.

Speaker 8 Hid the jar in a hand towel and found a secret place in the unfinished half of the basement to stash him somewhere dark and warm and private.

Speaker 8 I visited him from time to time, sometimes in the mornings when my husband and children were all out of the house, and I had time to come down and stare in wonder and revulsion at what had come out of my body.

Speaker 8 Sometimes after an evening out drinking wine with the golf club ladies at some suburban mansion or another,

Speaker 8 just to remind myself that another world existed, that a reality from which I was so alienated could exist within me.

Speaker 8 My little specimen sickened soon, and died.

Speaker 8 I felt

Speaker 8 sadness when I held his still jar to my bosom and sank down against the warmth of the furnace-room wall.

Speaker 8 A small sadness, but a genuine one, such as I had not felt in so much longer than I could recall.

Speaker 8 I mourned him, if you can believe it. Wore black for two entire days.

Speaker 8 But there were others like him soon enough, and before too long I'd created a little family in the basement.

Speaker 8 A neighborhood of crystal jars in whose brown and cloudy murk writhed half-seen cousins of my royal line, whose Habsburg daughter-nieces even now lay eggs in the lining of my inmost parts.

Speaker 8 A little kingdom upside down.

Speaker 8 And I was Queen Victoria.

Speaker 8 Something curious about my thinking, that you may find cause for self-reflection.

Speaker 8 Even at this point, where I was stacking jars of roundworms on my basement shelf, I still didn't believe I had them.

Speaker 8 Not most of the time, anyway.

Speaker 8 Yes, I had seen plenty of evidence that I did, but most of the time I simply didn't buy it.

Speaker 8 Because I was clean.

Speaker 8 I was a clean person.

Speaker 8 I washed my hands. I had the housekeeper wash all food thoroughly before it was prepared, and I stood over her to make sure she did it right.

Speaker 8 I only ate and ordered from reputable restaurants. There was no way I could have worms, because there was no way I could have gotten worms.

Speaker 8 So what were these things in jars? My little project. That was all.

Speaker 8 In the moments when I did believe, I began to develop a theory I could live with. You see, before the invention of the microscope, nobody had been able to see around worms' eggs.

Speaker 8 People assumed they arose by spontaneous generation. Perhaps there was still something to that theory.

Speaker 8 Perhaps I had generated them from my own flesh. In which case, since I was scrupulously clean, perhaps then they were as well.

Speaker 8 Now I had over thirty jars on my basement shelf, each with several worms inside.

Speaker 8 I mixed males and females both together, and then skipped board meetings to sit in the basement and see if they would fuck.

Speaker 8 If they would let me see what they did inside me.

Speaker 8 I knew the females were extraordinarily fertile, up to 60 million eggs per year.

Speaker 8 I imagined coming back in twelve months' time and finding the jars broken and a vast, unthinkable royal of roundworms boiling waist-deep across the basement floor. Imagine such

Speaker 8 fecundity, such life arising out of you. So rude, so vital, so unlike

Speaker 8 Well, anyway, I shat them out.

Speaker 8 I shat and shat, and ever more and more of my pure-blooded white children filled the bowl. I ran out of jars, and the worms kept coming.

Speaker 8 They also kept dying, and each little twinge of pain built up into a sense of the tearfulness of life that I had never felt from human suffering before.

Speaker 8 I took to wearing black all the time. A few of the women at the club followed suit, afraid of missing out on a trend.

Speaker 8 I considered finding some sort of substrate that my worms could survive in. Something more than feculent water I could fill the jars with.

Speaker 8 Maybe I could catch a squirrel and scoop its guts for my children to enjoy.

Speaker 8 These were the sorts of thoughts I I was beginning to have.

Speaker 8 Around this time, my daughter fell sick.

Speaker 8 Human daughter, I mean.

Speaker 8 Flu-like symptoms. Well, well, well.

Speaker 8 They made her isolate from school, but I knew it wasn't COVID. Recognized the symptoms straight away.
I told her I was proud of her, and she didn't understand why. But you.

Speaker 8 You understand.

Speaker 8 And so I can explain it to you. My worms were clean, spontaneously birthed, and so there was no way I could have transmitted them to my daughter.

Speaker 8 Which meant her worms were also virgin-born, miraculously conceived. How else?

Speaker 8 And so I was proud of her, because it meant she was the same as me, of such pure substance as to give unconsummated birth to pure, untainted creatures.

Speaker 8 White simplicities of minimal and elegant platonic form.

Speaker 8 Well, she told me she wanted to see a doctor. I told her not to bother.
Just some little bug that's making all the rounds. Most of the ladies at the BNR have it now, I told her.

Speaker 8 I even had the same thing a few months back, remember? And I recovered fully, didn't I?

Speaker 8 I didn't, at the time, understand the queasy look she gave me.

Speaker 8 And was my behavior so transformed? Only for the better, I thought.

Speaker 8 So I wore black and dressed in a veil everywhere I went. I looked good, especially since I had lost more than thirty pounds.

Speaker 8 So I left the galas early and prowled around the darkened grounds looking for dead things.

Speaker 8 So my purse stank. So what?

Speaker 8 I had my reasons, didn't I? And anything was better than the endless rounds of stilted conversation. Jen Mares had her second wedding at the AGO.
Who cares?

Speaker 8 Phil Cosgrave's winery hit 4% return last quarter? All wine is piss. My worms need better nourishment than that.
Margot Fitzgerald's son is starting law at Osgoode next September.

Speaker 8 There are living things that fuck inside me as we speak, you stupid bitch.

Speaker 8 Well,

Speaker 8 these were my thoughts. I didn't say them aloud as I wolfed down pounds of fatty cheese and rich foie grat dinners and soirees.

Speaker 8 But maybe I had changed a little, after all.

Speaker 8 And not even I realized how much I'd changed until the night my daughter tearfully confessed.

Speaker 8 She'd been to the doctor and had some tests. She had, of all the horrid things in the world, worms.

Speaker 8 She'd already started her deworming pills. I lost control.
Struck her full strength in the face and screamed at her.

Speaker 8 Must have hit her harder than I thought because her face remained so red for hours, and my husband shouted at me and took her and Jonathan to stay with his mother that night.

Speaker 8 Leaving me alone.

Speaker 8 Or so they thought.

Speaker 8 One is never truly alone when one has friends.

Speaker 8 For several days I was left alone. And while I was, the work continued at an extraordinary pace.
I still had access to my bank accounts back then.

Speaker 8 I purchased huge polyvinyl bins and filled them in the basement. My need for calories exploded.

Speaker 8 Knowing it was only a matter of time before they cut me off, I purchased entire tubs of whey protein and found pork lard through an industrial supplier. The drums of lard were especially useful.

Speaker 8 Once I had emptied one, I could refill it with my young. I drank water ceaselessly, for I lost hydration and extreme volume with my writhing splats.

Speaker 8 Electrolytes were of major concern. My lips became chapped and burned from the eating of fistfuls of salt.
But the work continued. I barely slept.

Speaker 8 A frenzied energy was upon me, a sense of great mission, and in the dark hours of night I would wander through my neighborhood, pollinating doorknobs and mailboxes with my wet touch. Great fecundity.

Speaker 8 Sixty million eggs in a lifetime. And how many thousands, how many tens of thousands, were now pounding and thronged inside of me.
My belly had begun to grow.

Speaker 8 For so long I had felt pregnant. Now I truly looked it.

Speaker 8 There were hurdles, of course. When police came by for a wellness check, I was not home.

Speaker 8 When the orderlies from a private clinic often called upon by people of my station broke in to take me for help, I was fully submerged in one of the writhing drums of my own stool, with only a snorkel from our old Bahamian vacations, breaking the surface to give me away.

Speaker 8 The orderlies did not look too closely, did not even make it down to the basement, because of the power of the smell.

Speaker 8 I liked it in the drum, the temperature of its fluid so close to that of my own body that it was like being at one with the world.

Speaker 8 When the vibration of the orderly's footsteps faded and the front door crashed shut, I emerged. Milk-white Aphrodite birthed from the ocean foam

Speaker 8 and ran with watery footsteps up the carpeted stairs to the second-story washroom.

Speaker 8 I had known I would have little time to act once the extent of my work was discovered. I had known that lesser minds would find themselves alienated by its scope until they could be made to see.

Speaker 8 I bathed myself, though I found it disgusting to be touched by water from any source less pure than that of my own virginal interiors.

Speaker 8 Indeed, for two days at that point I had been subsisting on a perfect cycle.

Speaker 8 Yet I cleaned myself as I had done in the days before I understood what true cleanliness meant, and I used perfumes of disgusting floral scent, and I inked my eyelashes and painted my mouth as best as I could remember how to do.

Speaker 8 Then I went out. The private school was only a few blocks' walk away from the great house where we lived.

Speaker 8 It was twilight then, and with the darkness of huge front-yard oaks and cherry-trees to shade me from the darkening sky, the dim cast-iron lamp-posts that our neighborhood still maintained at private expense, I drew no attention as I hurried down towards the school's Jacobithan bulk.

Speaker 8 I was, as you will recall, a member of the board, though perhaps they had revoked that status status from me as I left them all behind. They had not, however, been able to reclaim my key.

Speaker 8 I let myself in through a side door. It was half an hour until the gala.
Black-clad caterers had finished all their preparations, and now stood in sullen circle by a service door, burning cigarettes.

Speaker 8 They didn't notice me. And inside, the staff and students were all gone, the guests not yet arrived.
I knew my way, of course.

Speaker 8 For fifteen minutes I was unsupervised around the food and drink.

Speaker 8 I only needed ten, then locked myself in the janitor's basement washroom. There I waited, with the lights out, chuckling to myself in silent jubilation.

Speaker 8 In the dark spaces inside me, I think I felt my children chuckling too.

Speaker 8 How many times had I planned the school gala? How well were its patterns and timetable aligned with my own circadian rhythms?

Speaker 8 I knew exactly when, without having to consult my watch, the guests arrived, the band began to play.

Speaker 8 I didn't need the distant murmurs vibrating through the floor to know the gala had begun, or their gradual cessation to know the speeches had begun.

Speaker 8 I knew, you will understand, the exact right moment.

Speaker 8 I let myself out of the water closet. My brightly coloured dress swished around my ankles as I slithered down the hall.

Speaker 8 At the bottom of the right set of stairs I paused, seeing the dim golden glow of the dining hall above, hearing the quiet rumble of the dean as he gave his time-worn speech.

Speaker 8 Then I skipped up the steps and strode into the middle of the hall, my heels click resounding from the old hardwood floors, the hammer beam vaults above.

Speaker 8 There came a gasp and a silence.

Speaker 8 A clink of cutlery let fall from nerveless hands. I smiled around me through my red-rhymed lips.
Two hundred people gathered there at satin-draped tables, and all of the old familiar faces.

Speaker 8 I'm here, I announced, cradling my heavy belly, because there's something you should understand.

Speaker 8 My husband started to say something that began with my name, and there was a murmur of furious consternation from the high table.

Speaker 8 But I had run that school behind the scenes for so many years. I knew how to control the room, and my voice rose smoothly over top the din.

Speaker 8 We're all supposed to be the better sort of people here, I told them. But we're out of touch, and

Speaker 8 and what?

Speaker 8 All the time I had longed for and anticipated this moment, and what I realized I wasn't sure what to say. How to sell my great cleanliness to people trapped in tainted minds.
How How could I

Speaker 8 And they wouldn't give me time

Speaker 8 Already a handful of the fathers and teachers were hurrying towards me with their dinner jackets off and sleeves rolled up and looks of compassionate concern upon their imbecile faces.

Speaker 8 No time for speech. I would have to show them all.

Speaker 8 I reached down and lifted up the dress, up over my swollen belly, over the neat, square aperture I had cut into my swollen belly.

Speaker 8 The sight of this was enough to make the men hesitate. I confess, the memory of the looks on their faces still brings a smile to my cheeks.
Somebody screamed at one of the tables.

Speaker 8 I think, but do not know, it might have been my daughter.

Speaker 8 Then I reached down and grabbed the hard big bulge of my blocked intestine and held it out like a bouquet.

Speaker 8 The men, those bankers, shareholders, fathers, and heirs, fell back, not knowing what to do. With all the frenzied strength in my fingers, I squeezed the hard tube of my gut,

Speaker 8 and it burst,

Speaker 8 and let my children out.

Speaker 8 Now, several months since that night, I am still, as you can tell, here,

Speaker 8 and though they have sewn me shut and irradiated my fecal wound to kill my writhing children, I still find ways to bring them back.

Speaker 8 They don't understand how I keep reinfecting myself. They think I have hidden some of my infectious material in this room.

Speaker 8 That at nights I creep from bed and lick at some wet spot behind a pipe I seeded when I first arrived.

Speaker 8 And though they have found and bleached many such stashes that I have left, and they have caught me licking at the floor behind the toilet seat, they have not yet discerned the truth that you and I both understand

Speaker 8 that they arise from within

Speaker 8 that they are not infectious, save only as the Word of God is infectious.

Speaker 8 Let me tell you something only I understand.

Speaker 8 This world is fully just

Speaker 8 just not for us.

Speaker 8 This world was made for finer beings, cleaner, whiter beings that arise spontaneous from only the purest soil.

Speaker 8 He is not our God, but theirs,

Speaker 8 the God of the roundworm.

Speaker 8 And if you keep this truth in mind, the world will make only the most perfect sense.

Speaker 8 A few are coming to understand by now.

Speaker 8 You still come to visit me, of course.

Speaker 8 And Margot, and one of the fathers whose mouth was filled with my erupting children all those nights ago.

Speaker 8 And just the other night, as I stood at the window of this upper room, I saw my daughter on the street below.

Speaker 8 My heart lifted, for she was dressed in black,

Speaker 8 not as a daughter who mourns a mother locked away,

Speaker 8 but as a mother herself,

Speaker 8 one who mourns the death of a perfect child, fallen still in his glass jar hidden secretly away.

Speaker 8 I know that grief too well.

Speaker 8 But there's something else I know.

Speaker 8 I know as I stand tonight at my upper window, I will see her pass below again.

Speaker 8 She'll be wearing a brightly coloured dress this time, and her hand, her gentle hand will rest so lightly on her belly's subtle swell.

Speaker 11 The Wrong Station is made possible with the generous support of our listeners on Patreon.

Speaker 11 Visit today at patreon.com slash the wrongstation for an ad-free RSS, bonus episodes, behind-the-scenes discussions, and more.

Speaker 11 This week's episode, Vermis, was written by Alexander Saxton and performed by Rachel Hart.

Speaker 11 Thank you to Kellrazer, Alex L., Zach Anderson, Melissa Baudreaux, Casey Darby, Laura Aggie, Hannah Maddox, Amy Sloan, Tyler Fallon, James J.

Speaker 11 Farti, Sarah Jenkins Fleming, M, Clifford Greer Jr., Coulter Van Epps, and Kira Russell for helping us keep the lights, well, off.

Speaker 11 The Wrong Station is co-produced by Alexander Saxton, Anthony Botello, and Jacob Duarte Spiel, with music composed and performed by Alon Sitram and arranged for the viola and performed by Viola Schmidt.

Speaker 11 You can follow The Wrong Station on social media at The Wrong Station and email us at the wrongstation at gmail.com.

Speaker 11 And until next time,

Speaker 4 thank you for listening.

Speaker 3 I am a coach and an alum of Girls on the Run. Kids today carry a lot of stress from school pressure to social isolation to overuse of devices.

Speaker 3 We create a space where girls can connect, build confidence, and learn skills like managing emotions, setting goals, and speaking up. Each child's experience is different, and families need support.

Speaker 3 I'm proud to be part of a comprehensive solution to youth mental health. Get involved today at EmpowerOurFutureCoalition.com.

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