How the Heartworms Came to Petit Trou

Abstract

I was during the time that the Major’s wife was pregnant that the heartworms came. Th ey swept along the ocean waves just like the Caribs and the Spanish had long centuries past, and they washed across the islands of the sea. Th ey didn’t come to Petit Trou at first, At first they hit the outer islands and the cities like San Gabriel and Guadeloupe. But everyone in Petit Trou had heard stories. First, the dogs would go. Th e worms would creep into their mouths or noses while they slept. Th ey’d travel down their arteries and curl up in the chambers of the heart, and there they’d mate and make more worms that curled up white and tiny in the ventricles and auricles and eat away the vena cava. Th ey’d slide into the lungs and fill them up like water filling up a ship. And if the carcass of a dog were opened up, the worms would spill out like a pile of tiny skeletons. Outside, the dog would wince and curl into a ball as if it wanted to surround its heart and keep the pain from coming in. Th e pain, however, was already in. And there was nothing anyone could do. Th e dog would howl and squeal. He’d shake all over with convulsions. Th en he’d die. Although the world had reached the age of science, no one understood the heartworms—why they came or why they went beyond the dogs, which they had never done before. Th ey got into the parakeets and myna birds. Th ey got into the cats and donkeys and the cattle and the mules. Th ey got into the howler monkeys. Th en they reached the people. And no one knew a way to stop them.