Thomas Wilson Jones is a Normal Man.

Thomas Wilson Jones is a normal man. He wakes up each morning with a yawn and arm flung over the woman, Vicki, next to him. He curses the alarm that causes both bodies to stir like worms in a jar of fish bait. For a brief moment before he stands he wishes that his arms were coated in the same slimy residue as those wriggling creatures, if only to make an excuse to stick to his bed for five minutes longer. As per usual, Vicki will get up first, warming Thomas’ cheek with a kiss full of morning breath and the smell of sleep before she pads towards the door. Without a glance back, she leaves him alone in their fish food bed.

Thomas Wilson Jones is a normal man. He doesn’t think much, going through the rhythms of work preparations with a memorized speed. Get dressed. Brush his teeth. Comb his hair. Breakfast. Kiss Vicki on the mouth before she looks at him with those wide blue eyes, question on the tip of her tongue, and their toddler clutching to her calf. Thomas loves her, a fact as indisputable as the sun rising each day. However, Thomas WIlson Jones is a normal man, and he can’t handle the shrieking and crying that is the byproduct of getting his children through the same morning routine.

“Wait, Tom!” She yells after him. He looks over his shoulder, eyebrow quirked up high in what he hopes is a ‘I’m going to be late for work and I really have to go’ look. “I thought we had a date today. Where are you going?”

Thomas pauses, his raised eyebrow morphing into a slightly concerned expression. “I’m going into the office, babe. I’ve got a meeting at nine.” He retraces his steps back so he’s in front of her again. His extra six inches allows him the ability to hold her cheek and brush back her bangs to press his lips to the space between her furrowed brows. The small hairs tickle the areas beside his mouth, the tension in her features bleeding into his rough skin. Soon, Vicki returns to her natural, resting beauty. Her long, glossy lashes brush against his chin as her eyes flutter. It’s a moment much more intimate than his earlier kiss that served as a rushed apology. It’s a moment much more intimate than he’s used to, and one that has required much more use in the past few months.

Thomas releases her forehead from the wet touch of his lip, crooking his head to meet her eyes. “Let’s go on a date tomorrow, yeah?”

Vicki’s gaze travels the creases of his face, mapping them like rivers in the world that seems to manifest between them. “Okay,” she breathes, seeming to have forgotten the previous tensions. “Let’s go tomorrow.”

Thomas Wilson Jones is a normal man. His wife is far from it. He still remembers that humid afternoon seven months ago in the Neurologist’s Memory Department. It had just rained for the first time that summer, earthworms rushing towards the surface for a taste of fresh rainwater. On the walk between the parking lot and the main building, Thomas was keen to avoid stepping on the hardened, dead carcasses of the mud-dwelling lifeforms. Checking in had passed in a blur, the ticking of the red, skinny seconds hand being one of the only sensory effects he could hold on to in the flurry of his thoughts. That, and the feeling of Vicki’s thumb tracing the grooves in his wedding band. Forever Together, it read.

Maybe Vicki shouldn’t have been the one comforting him. Thomas wasn’t about to receive a diagnosis that would change the course of his work, his retirement, and the rest of his life. But he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t help looking at her and thinking: What happens when she doesn’t remember me, when she doesn’t remember our kids?

“Fuck,” he cursed, pressing the thumb and index finger of his right hand into his eyes. He pushed hard enough to feel pain, hard enough for his brain to wave bright red danger flags and force his body to freeze up. “I can’t do this,” he’d whispered with a sharp, pleading note in his voice. He was begging without putting a single question to voice. Imploring Vicki to hold his hand in the strength of her fingers and to calm him with her unwavering confidence.

That day, she’d received her diagnosis of Primary Progressive Aphasia, an affliction of the mind. The doctor had described that her memory would remain relatively untouched; the knowledge seemed to be a small consolation for Vicki, as she shared a soft, reassuring look with him. Thomas Wilson Jones was a normal man. And his wife, the strongest, most stable person in his life has Primary Progressive Aphasia. Anywhere between three and fifteen years, she’d no longer be able to write. She’d have to quit her job. Her emotions would spiral into anger and frustration. Thomas imagined the worms gnawing away at her brain, wriggling around in the left hemisphere until the brain matter would be completely replaced by a watery slush. And once it was all dried up, and Vicki no longer understood the world around her, they would crust up on her skull. They would stick like plaque to the bone, writhing in their own desert of a cave.

A year after that day, and five months after their dinner date, Vicki had only gotten worse. She couldn’t care for the kids, because everytime they cried, she’d yell that she really didn’t even know why they were still alive. She couldn’t drive, because she threatened to press the petal to the metal whenever some random asshole cut in front of her. And she had long quit her work at a Neuroscience research laboratory, since Thomas had to sit in the dean’s lavishly furnished office explaining that this wasn’t his wife, but the slowly corrupting folds of her frontal cortex.

When Vicki’s symptoms had twisted from simple forgetting of words and an inability to generate complex language to long nights with two cold cups of coffee and a forty year old woman crying on the rug in their living room, Thomas had approached a support group for caretakers of people with neurodegenerative diseases. It had helped at first; a man caring for his husband with Early-Onset Alzeihmers had shown him what locks he used on the knife drawers – a conversation Thomas was sure he’d never have –; an exasperated woman needing a break from her mother offered to visit and watch their kids for a weekend; a lovely older man who always smelled of cookies and whose skin was covered in a pride-inducing raspberry birthmark asked Thomas if he’d like to come over for a cup of tea and homemade biscuits sometime.

The evil, wriggling monsters in her mind decided only to eat more. Soon enough, she was refusing to take her medicine, and Thomas couldn’t reason with her like he used to. He was strained every day, muscles weak from a lack of time spent in their bait jar bedroom. Occasionally, he reasoned that it would be useful to hire someone professional to manage Vicki’s daily crises.

But the worms waited for no one. They infected every part of their lives, from mornings to nights to when Vicki would wander the house at midnight. As always, she’d close the door behind her without a single look back at him.

Thomas Wilson Jones is a normal man. And he felt, with all these worms infesting his mind, like he was drying up.