There is a healthy amount of feral and even demonic in your average three-year-old, for only in gleeful destruction and chaos do you learn that you are a distinct person, separate from your mother’s tits and expectations. For your body to be still mostly mush but your brain learning to speak an entire nonsense language that we just made up for ourselves, just for fun, the supernatural must be involved.

I think most nurseries must have ghosts, soothing babes as they wake up at witching hour, singing them lullabies from beyond the veil. Being shoved out into this horrible, horrible world without their permission—the dead are sympathetic.

Our preschool is in one of the many historic churches of Philadelphia. Light shines through stained glass onto potty accidents, pews emptied, Magna Tiles brought in. Where the preacher once stood, I now read politically correct children’s books about valuing each color of the rainbow. They are heavy-handed but sweet, in their awkward, anxious, well-intentioned way. At the pulpit, I also beg them to stop gnawing the furniture and scratching their butts. They itch their wormy assholes and then trail their stubby fingers along each toy and table.

My coworker approaches me nervously, gently touches my arm. “When I’m talking to parents about it, do I say anus, or butthole?” she asks. She radiates concern and nausea.

I remember being small, having pinworms. I walked down the sidewalk, tiny child-fists clenched, thinking angrily to myself, “I am not scared of the worms in my butt.”

Now, I look at my kids. I am scared of the worms in their butts.

As we scrub the school down with bleach, we imagine them bonding with their worms, naming them, playing with them. “The worms in my butt are my friends!”

Some of my preschool students are changelings; those are the ones who teach the others how to create mayhem, how to throw your cheerios on the floor and recognize your first letters of the alphabet.

You learn to hurt before you learn why not to hurt. Violence comes before morality, we must learn we have the power to cause pain before we can learn why not to wield that power on our fellow diapered friends. You also learn to love and bestow kindness before you learn why a person might not be deserving of kindness. You love before you hate. This makes this age volatile and glorious. 

Some kids are changelings, proper ghouls, others sweeter fae. I have one werewolf pup, several imps. Other children are caught between the worlds, one foot in preschool, another far beyond. My favorite is one of these, she has been made itchy, uncomfortable from not choosing her side.

Some days, Itchy cups my cheeks in her hands, looks my demons straight in the eye, and asks me why the world is making me sad and tired. She strokes my hair and nestles, burrowing into me.

Other days, we call them “no words” or “baby” days, Itchy exclusively howls and screeches. Her mother calls it regression, her acting like a baby, but I’ve never heard a baby with so much unbridled angst and deep discomfort in their body. I think of them as creature days, demon days, I never asked to be born as a human girl so instead will be a banshee days.

I have never, in my entire life, met someone who loved me so much so quickly as this child. She is clairvoyant and gentle and absolutely feral. I want to keep her for myself and raise her in the moonlight.

Gender is of course a nonsense prison, but there is something about being a little boy and needing to break things. Maybe it comes with the difficulty of having a tiny and new penis and the slow, excruciating process of training it to piss in one confined oval. They are so bad at this.

My children remark constantly on each other’s penises and vaginas, as they sit side by side on the two little toilets. The girls watch the boys hose down the entire classroom, distracted as they pee, turning to tell me something, surprised as the line of piss follows their movements, lands on my knelt lap. The girls smirk as I beg the boys to sit down, frantically shout “Where is your penis pointed!” already reaching for the bleach spray.

This school is certainly haunted, with the combined ghosts of Christianity and Childcare. When I lockup at night, music always sounds from the youngest classroom right as I flick off the light. Specifically, instrumental “Old McDonald.” I am used to it by now, and just want the ghosts to make themselves useful. Become just corporeal enough to do a load of ass-worm laundry and scrub the furniture.

I bring them outside, into what I assume was once a graveyard and is now a playground. All the kids take their shoes and socks off, in the 30-degree gloom, and throw them over the fence onto the asphalt of the busy street. They run from my gentle teacherly disapproval, inhumanly fast, the speed only a ghoul-toddler can reach when running from mild discipline, their tiny bare toes turning pink.

One of my favorite mothers approaches, to scoop her angry, beautiful son. I jovially show her the bite mark he gave me, she responds, “Yes, it’s a full moon today. Worm moon.” She carries her cuddly pup into the dusk, wrapping him in her long wool coat. He grins goodbye to me, his canines gleaming in streetlamp light.

My remaining gremlin-creatures dig for worms in the wet dirt, with shovels, then fingers, their fervor intensifying. I tell the worms to hide, or else they will be smushed or worse, eaten by Shy. This hobgoblin and his oral fixation are unstoppable.

They get angrier as they find no worms—it is raining, the worms are drowning on the sidewalk, most likely, but I do not tell them this. I wonder if it is their assholes making them dig like this, seeking brethren.

Female pinworms come out at night, crawling to the surface of the anus to lay their eggs while the child sleeps soundly. It is getting dark on the playground, I feel the worms gaining control over my children, power rising with the white moon.

I run to the kitchen, grab the garlic powder as my talisman, home remedy for vampires and pinworms.  Bleach, as always, my holy water. I coax them back inside, uttering prayers to the Deworming Gods and Saints of Hygiene, as the kids rub their itchy butts along the classroom walls, wrinkling their noses in discomfort.

My wormy demon babes are growing restless in the night air, ready to lay eggs from their own young bodies, infect. I smell one has shit herself—she is always my most stubborn pooper, but now, I dare not change her. I am so vulnerable, kneeling on the bathroom floor, wrestling chubby legs out of shit-soaked pink leggings. I am too scared to see what lies within.

Itchy looks at me pleadingly, her fey and human halves aligned this once in mutual unease of the ass. I ache to help her, return her to sweet feral freedom. The worms are trying to domesticate her, I realize.  Our skins crawl with the injustice of taming, housebreaking, breeding a creature such as this. She itches rabidly against the will of the worms, while they conspire against her in the den they have made inside of her.

– Madeleine Gavaler

Author’s Note: This is my first published piece!