No one came to visit Clara after the stillbirth.

She had chosen to carry the corpse. Not because she was in denial, the doctors made that mistake, but because something inside her refused to let go. There were complications, yes. The umbilical cord twisted like a noose. The heartbeat vanished in the third trimester. And yet, she remained swollen. Her belly did not deflate. Her skin stretched. And she felt something… move. They told her it was psychosomatic. Phantom kicks. Her mind’s way of coping with loss. But Clara knew better.

The first sign was the warmth. Too much warmth. A fever that didn’t break. Then the scent, metallic, earthy, like mushrooms rotting in blood. She would sit in the dark, rocking herself gently, hands cradling her stomach, whispering lullabies to what was becoming. Because the baby was not decomposing. Not in the way they said it would. Not quietly. Not still.

She began to bleed. Thick, black blood. With it came the first shape, small, pink, blind. It crawled across her thigh, trailing afterbirth. She did not scream. She smiled.

The worms did not simply feed on the dead flesh. They organized. They nested. They multiplied. She could feel them building something sacred inside her. A soft cathedral of digestion and whispering mouths. She stopped eating. They were consuming enough for all of them. Her skin grew pale. Translucent. She could see them beneath, curling just beneath the surface like adoring infants reaching toward their mother’s heart. By the end of the third week, her belly had grown twice its original size.

She could barely walk, but she crawled to the cellar each night, where she had prepared the cradle. Not for a baby, no. For them.

In the dark, they spoke to her in pulses. In tiny rasping noises like prayers wriggling through soil. She named them. Each one. She remembered every movement, every squirm, every kissless mouth pressed against the inside of her womb.

She began to cut herself, just beneath the navel. A small incision. A Caesarean of her own design. Not to remove them… no. To breathe with them. To open her body like scripture. Her flesh a verse. Her blood a hymn. They emerged slowly, reverently, through the slit.

One by one. Each bearing a face. Each whispering the name she had given it, in a voice almost human. She Was never a mother. She was a Verminal Shrine, a sacred site of vermin-born ressurection.