The pharmacy was on Main Street in a town that Main Street had forgotten. Frank Miller had owned it for seven years. Seven years of sitting behind the counter, watching the parking lot, waiting for people who mostly didn't come.

He was fifty-two. He wore the same clothes every day—blue slacks, white shirt, a cardigan in winter. His hair was gray and thin. He had a receding hairline that had been receding since he was thirty. He looked fifty-five.

His son hadn't spoken to him in three years. After the divorce, the boy had chosen his mother. Frank understood this. He didn't like it, but he understood it. He drove to the diner every morning at seven and drank coffee and read the Dayton newspaper and went home and watched the evening news and went to bed.

The Wurm appeared in the basement one Tuesday. Frank didn't know how it got there. The basement had a crack in the foundation near the water heater, and maybe it had come through that. Or maybe it had always been there, and Frank had just never noticed it, because Frank noticed almost nothing.

It was big. Bigger than any centipede had a right to be. Nearly a foot long. Reddish-brown. Legs moving in waves. Frank stood over it for a long time, his hands in his cardigan pockets, watching it move across the concrete floor.

Then he went upstairs and got a glass jar from the supply closet and came back down and watched it for a while longer and then got a pair of tongs and put it in the jar.

He put the jar on a shelf behind the counter, next to the cough syrup and the Band-Aids and the pack of cigarettes he kept for himself. He forgot about it.

Three days later, a woman came in.

She was maybe thirty. Maybe forty. It was hard to tell. Her face was thin and pale, and her eyes were red—not from crying, Frank thought, but from something else. Something in the blood. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt and a look that said she had stopped caring about what other people thought a long time ago.

Do you have anything for snakebite? she asked.

Frank looked at her arm. There were marks on it—black lines, thin as thread, spreading from her wrist toward her elbow. They were moving. He saw them move.

I don't know about snakebite, he said. I have ibuprofen.

She laughed. It was a dry sound. Not funny. Just dry.

It's not a regular snakebite, she said. It's worse.

Frank's Wurm was agitated in the jar. Its legs moved in rapid waves, striking the glass. Frank noticed this. He noticed a lot of things that day, though he wouldn't have been able to tell you why.

What's your name? he asked.

Lisa.

Snake Lisa, the man in the parking lot called her.

Frank had heard this before. The man who owned the barber shop next door—Mr. Henderson, sixty-eight, arthritic knees, knew everything—had told him about Lisa. She lived in a trailer in the park off Route 44. She was an addict. She had been an addict for most of her adult life. She sold whatever she could sell—furniture, clothes, sometimes herself. She came to the pharmacy sometimes for painkillers. Frank gave her what he could give her within the limits of state law and his own conscience, which was not much and not little, just what the law allowed.

Snake Lisa stood behind the counter now, looking at the jar.

What's that? she asked.

A centipede, Frank said.

It's looking at me, Lisa said.

It doesn't have eyes that work like yours, Frank said.

It's looking at me, Lisa said. And it's scared.

Frank looked at the Wurm. It was pressing itself against the glass. Its legs were moving so fast they were a blur.

Go home, Lisa, Frank said.

I can't, Lisa said. It's inside me. I can feel it moving. I can feel it going up my arm and into my chest and into my lungs. And I can't stop it.

She put a crumpled five-dollar bill on the counter. Not enough for anything. Just a five. Frank put it in the register without thinking about it.

Lisa left. Frank went to the back room and sat down on the cot he kept there for naps and closed his eyes and thought about nothing, which was what he was good at.

The next day, Lisa came back.

The black lines had reached her elbow. They were darker now. Thicker. They pulsed when she breathed.

It's worse, she said.

Frank looked at the Wurm in the jar. It was going crazy. Its legs were a blur. Its body was pressing against the glass from every direction at once.

Mr. Henderson told me about you, Lisa said. About the trailer park. About what I sell.

I didn't tell anybody about you, Frank said.

You didn't have to, Lisa said. Everybody knows.

She sat down on the chair behind the counter. She was breathing slowly. Her eyes were half-closed. Her tongue kept flicking out to wet her lips. Once. Twice. Three times. Each time, her tongue was longer.

Frank put the jar on the counter between them.

Look at it, he said.

Lisa looked at the jar. The Wurm was still going crazy.

It knows, Lisa said.

Knows what?

That I'm almost gone.

She closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were different. Not red anymore. Clear. Too clear. Like someone had replaced her irises with pieces of green glass.

I'm sorry, Lisa said. For whatever I did to deserve this.

Deserve what? Frank asked.

This, Lisa said. Opening her mouth. Her tongue was fully forked now. Split down the middle like a snake's. I didn't ask for this. But here it is.

Frank went to his apartment above the pharmacy. He took the jar from the shelf. He carried it downstairs to his bedroom. He put it on his bed. He pulled the quilt over it.

Then he went back to the pharmacy and sat behind the counter and waited.

The sun went down. The parking lot emptied. The town went quiet. Frank sat in the dim light of a single fluorescent bulb and watched the door.

At midnight, the door opened.

Lisa walked in. She wasn't wearing the sweatshirt anymore. She was wearing something else—something that caught the fluorescent light and made it look green. Her skin was smooth. Too smooth. Like reptile skin, but human-shaped. Her legs were merging. Her feet were flattening.

She looked at the bed in the back room. She looked at Frank.

You hid, she said.

I'm waiting, Frank said.

She came into the back room. She stood over the bed. The quilt was moving. Something was breathing underneath it. Slow. Steady.

The Wurm emerged. It climbed out from under the quilt and faced Lisa. Its body was raised. Its legs were ready.

Lisa looked at it. Her green eyes were clear. Her forked tongue flicked out once.

Hello, she said.

The Wurm moved. It launched across the bed, landing on Lisa's foot. Its fangs sank into her skin. Lisa didn't flinch. She looked down at the Wurm with an expression that was almost gentle.

Then her body changed. Her leg elongated. Scaled. Tail-like. It wrapped around the Wurm's body. The Wurm bit again. And again. Lisa's tail tightened. Frank heard the sound of the Wurm's exoskeleton cracking.

He wanted to do something. He was a pharmacist. He didn't fight monsters. But he stood up anyway. He walked toward the bed.

Lisa looked at him. Her green eyes were full of something—regret? relief? Frank couldn't tell.

Don't, she said.

The Wurm broke free. It fell to the floor, half its body crushed. It crawled toward Lisa's face. She opened her mouth. Her jaw unhinged. Something inside her glowed—green, sickly.

The Wurm drove its remaining fangs into the center of her throat. Lisa convulsed. Her body went rigid. The tail went limp. Her head fell forward.

She was dead.

The Wurm lay beside her, broken in three places, its legs still twitching. Frank waited until the twitching stopped.

On the floor, beside Lisa's throat, was a small object. It glowed faintly—green. Frank picked it up. It was warm. It pulsed.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he put it back on the floor.

He went to the front of the pharmacy. He locked the door. He turned off the fluorescent bulb. He sat in the dark behind the counter and listened to the silence.

In the morning, he swept up the glass. He mopped the floor. He put the Wurm's remains in a box. He drove to the edge of town, where the farmland ended and the woods began, and he dug a hole beneath an oak tree and buried the box.

He didn't mark the grave. He didn't need to.

He drove back to the pharmacy. He unlocked the door. He turned on the lights. He sat behind the counter and waited for people who mostly didn't come.

A man came in at ten. He asked for aspirin. Frank gave him aspirin. The man left. Frank went back to waiting.

The Wurm's jar was still on the shelf behind the counter. Empty. Frank didn't take it down. He didn't put anything in it. He just left it there, on the shelf, next to the cough syrup and the Band-Aids and the pack of cigarettes.

Sometimes, when the parking lot was empty and the fluorescent bulb was humming and the town was quiet, Frank would look at the jar and think about the woman in the green eyes and the forked tongue and the way she had said don't like a person asking someone not to hurt them, and he would feel something in his chest that was not quite sadness and not quite guilt and not quite anything he had a name for.

But he didn't name it. He just sat behind the counter and waited and drank his coffee and read his newspaper and let the unnamed thing sit in his chest like a stone that was also a seed and didn't do anything with it.

That was what he was good at. Doing nothing. Waiting. Letting things be what they were.

The jar sat on the shelf. The pharmacy sat on Main Street. The town forgot Main Street a little more. And Frank Miller sat behind the counter and lived his life, which was not a hero's life and not a villain's life and not a tragic life and not a happy life, just a life, which happened, and that was all.

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OTMES v2 Code: DR-2010-OHIO-VOID-4ACT-1280W-NO-SUP-PER-1PL-LIM Style: Dirty Realism (DR) Year: 2010 Setting: Ohio Rust Belt Theme: Meaninglessness and Acceptance (无意义与接受) Structure: 4-Act, 1280 words Mode: No supernatural explanation, biological realism, deliberate ambiguity Perspective: Third-person limited Point of View: First-person internal consciousness Limitation: Single narrative thread