Edward’s wife was the first to notice, asking him one night if he felt at all well.

“Why?” he replied, his voice wooden.

“It’s just…” she started, then, fearing the sound of the words, she stopped herself. But she was certain that right there before her eyes her husband of forty-two autumns, Edward Forest, was turning to wood.

She had seen the way the flames reached out to lick his fingertips and thighs as he passed by the fire. “Don’t sit so close to the fire,” she had warned, picturing him igniting, imagining the heat.

In an attempt to assess the severity of his condition Edward’s wife contemplated all of the things that she knew about wood. There were things that she thought and told herself not to think again. But no matter how hard she tried the thoughts returned and she indulged in them, then she spoke them:

“How did you sleep?” as he woke. “Like a log?”

“Your bark is worse than your bite,” in the midst of his anger.

“You look rooted,” following his bout of manual labour. And, “You sure took some bark off,” when he exposed his wounds.

All of these thoughts became words and the words became a game and the game became Edward’s wife’s way of coping and her way of loving him. She began to suspect that he knew little of his condition and perhaps less of his prognosis until one night as he sat by the fire, he looked at her as though something was gnawing at him.

‘What’s wrong, Pinocchio?” she asked without thinking.

“Nothing,” he lied, scratching at his nose. “Nothing.”

Edward’s wife wakes early, well before Edward can move a single limb, and begins, in silence, to brush them off him. She sweeps them out of the room and back down the stairs, across the lounge and kitchen floors to the rear door. She knows that there will be more of them outside, a crush of them at the door, piled in their frenzy, dying beneath the infinite burden of their tiny little appetites.

About Patrick Cullen’s short story ‘The Termites’

‘The Termites’ was published in Skive, Issue No. 2 (December 2003).

Read more short stories by Patrick Cullen.