My heart is an apple. There's a worm in the apple. A heartworm. The tell-tale heartworm.

Helen wanted to give her heart to someone or something, but she felt it was too deceitful to share. She'd be embarrassed should someone find out that the worm had finally turned for her, and turned right into her heart.

Of the 4 chambers, it made the upper right atrium a study & library, where it did all of its bookworming. In the upper left atrium, her worm, who was named Annalida, had her home-brewed supercomputer cluster, powered by the natural electric muscle pulses of her heart. The supercluster was named Hermes. She was writing a computer worm that used TCP traffic to store its intentions as memory. This computer worm was named Caduceus. The network she was was experimenting with was named Icarus. She loved the worm enamoured and encircled Caduceus with romantic Icarus wings. She also played a vintage video game called "Snafu" on her supercomputer cluster, which generated randomness for ever changing encryption keys she used to guard her most sleepy secrets.

The lower left ventricle was where Annalida did her epicurean business. She was nearly genocidal about trichina worms. They were the termites of her iron and ironic bloody world. Pork was not allowed in the kitchen. When Helen had bacon, Annalida nearly lost her mind trying to keep all of the bacon fat out of her house. It stuck to the walls and the doors with a grotesque slovenly desperation.

The lower right ventricle was where the magic happened. It was her symbolic opium den, where she scryed the past with her scrying glass. She was her own divining rod for hope. She lived in that midland between wake and sleep, and left her pulsing drumming home on a magical carpet of dreams. She was reading:

At high noon of the night in which she departed, beckoning me, peremptorily, to her side, she bade me repeat certain verses composed by herself not many days before. I obeyed her. — They were these:

Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly —
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Wo!

That motley drama! — oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased forever more,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness and more of Sin
And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude! [page 460:]
It writhes! — it writhes! — with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And the seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.

Out — out are the lights — out all!
And over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
And the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

And she felt life was something, in the face of death. Helen could never give her away.