“I am I, with all the individuality of an earthworm. After a rain, who knows the unique pink worm by the twist of its elastic segments. Only the guts of the worm know. And it is nothing to crush the yellow liquid intestines under a casual heel.”
—Plath, April 1951, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
The striped worm came from space. Almost.
He crawled from the wreckage of the failed spacecraft, the lone survivor. He pulled himself through the overgrown grass, leaving behind a trail of bloody-brown ooze. He’d lost his back third in the impact when a row of metal lockers in the hall he had been sliding down came crashing to the floor. The metal lockers—fashioned from a foraged bandage tin—caught his tail end, squishing through his soft flesh as easily as he himself sometimes used to cut through the dirt in his own yard. Back before he’d been plucked from the dirt, made into an astronaut, and stopped spending his days outside simply being a worm.
The striped worm slowed to a stop, panting great heaving breaths. He strained to pull himself deeper into the overgrown grass, away from the sight of the crash and the tiny plumes of smoke that twisted away into the waking sky. The worm took a moment to stockpile some energy. He attempted to calm his breathing, and over the shaking-shuddering of his lungs, his heartbeat pulsed in his ears. His blood smacked against the ground: fat drops that collected in a brown-red puddle. The worm glanced at the puddle, failing to ignore its size or the speed of its growth.
The worm knew, by tomorrow, the earth will have absorbed and turned whatever of him he’d lost into something new, something he’d have no claim to. The worm also knew that if he didn’t keep moving, that brown-red puddle was all he’d ever come to be: a cache of life wasted, blood spilled out in the midst of the waiting. So he ground together the ends of his few cracked teeth and inched forward, making some progress in the crossing of the yard, whatever and whoever’s yard it was he’d crash-landed in.
The worm had moved another foot or so, a considerable distance for a worm, when he’d reached the end of his energy and resolved to take another brief break to recoup. The body he dragged sheened in sweat. When he stopped moving, he quickly grew cold. The worm ground his teeth constantly now to keep them from chattering. The light in the sky is not waning, the worm noted, yet still I grow cold.
The worm grew worried, too. His breath continued to shudder too fast, though he was glad to see, the blood flow from his wound had begun to slow. He looked away from his severed end quickly, for a sour wave had risen in his middle and threatened to purge him of whatever remained in his body. He forced himself to keep his contents inside, not knowing when he would next find sustenance. Looking around, the worm realized he was unsure of what his kind ate outside these days. He had grown too accustomed to living in a different world, one perhaps, he chided himself now, a bit too far removed from the world of other worms. A world he must have once understood how to navigate.
The worm turned his attention to the cherry-stained deck another sixteen-or-so feet ahead of him. He leaned into another push forward, hoping for a few inches before faltering to a weakness-induced stop, but fell short. The worm was spent. His fortitude had reached its end. He cursed himself between the crests of his heaving breaths, crashing like waves in his chest. He would never reach the deck, and he knew it. He would never enter that haven in the damp, wet dark, where the scraps of trash and bits of food collect and make for easy thriving. The worm suspected if he made it there, he would survive the night. If he did not find some moss or a bit of wadded-up newspaper to stifle his wound, he might never stop bleeding: the blood trailing after him over the land he’d cross like an unspooling red string.
No, he couldn’t let that happen.
The worm began to move forward as he thought harder and harder. Each thought he swung like the sharp blade of an ax with hope the momentum would carry him forward. Thoughts echoed in the bowl of his skull as if it were a cavern. He would be the sole survivor. He would not succumb to the crash of the spacecraft like the others. Grasshopper and Centipede, worm knew, had not made it. He had seen the corpses in his escape from the craft. Grasshopper’s neck twisted too far, the yellow ooze running down his thorax and over the ridges of his crumpled wings. Centipede’s body was in pieces, so many pieces. What legs remained attached to the arthropod’s trunk waved independently, still pulsing with the last remnants of energy. Worm had adrenaline coursing through his length and slid past the spent bodies of his comrades, his friends. They were beyond his help, and he knew it. The walls were slicked with viscera: purple, wet, black splatters darkening the ceiling.
Yellowjacket was nowhere in sight. Yellowjacket, Worm feared, had reveled in the terror of the others as the craft plummeted. He had seen the sick joy in those empty, reflecting eyes, pools of onyx that belonged to the striped insect. The worm had only ever seen himself in those onyx eyes when he dared look full-on.
Worm did not look for Yellowjacket for long. He slid quickly across the blood-soaked floor and squeezed through a hole singed through the outer wall of the craft, dropping to the soil of the yard with a wet slap. The strike against the ground reached a claw down the throat of the worm and stripped the air from his chest. The worm laid there, looking up at the sky, immobilized in fear and pain and shock at what had happened. Then, when the chains had loosened around his middle and Worm could breathe again, he turned over and began the slow crawl across the yard.
Yellowjacket could not have made it either, the worm conceded, pulling himself forward little by little as his thoughts distracted him from the pain and the strain of the movement over the earth, through the overgrown grass that pulled at all his parts, trying to carry him off in pieces, off in the grasses to never be seen again. No, Yellowjacket could not have made it out of the cockpit in time, and at this thought, a sinister, blood-stained grin broke out over Worm’s face. His thin lips cracked with the force of the grin, but Worm did not care. Yellowjacket had spent the least time or resources on the project, and when it came to it, insisted on being a front runner of the craft, manning the windows of the cockpit more than the controls, being a self-piloted craft after all. Worm’s grin gave way to broken, dark laughter as he thought of Yellowjacket’s exoskeleton ruptured in all the wrong places, spilling over the cockpit floor, soaking that woven grass with his viscera.
Worm’s laughter echoed in the yard, catching the attention of a nearby pair of wings folded in perch atop a pine fencepost. The owner of the wings was intrigued by such a small, sinister sound rising up from the overgrown grass. The wings criss-crossed the yard, eyes peering down, searching for the possessor of the voice that had pricked their ear. The wing-owner’s stomach had rumbled all morning. Worm had worked hard and pushed through, forged a tiny, almost imperceptible break in the unmowed spring grasses. Will the wing-owner have spotted this difference?
Above the weeds and grass ahead of Worm, the heads of small, conical purple wildflowers perched here and there, reaching skyward with their tiny, coalescent petals. The worm took inspiration from those tiny flowers, so small underneath so much world, but still looking, still reaching up. The worm strained towards those purple petals, dying to taste just one, but exhaustion had overtaken him, and he slumped to a stop. The soil warmed beneath the worm. He stared at the flowers, willing his chest to grow lighter, blinking soil from the corners of his squinting eyes.
The sun hung from its chain in the summit of the sky, but the day somehow seemed to darken all around Worm. He knew this to be a bad sign. He stared through the grass and tried to see across the twelve feet of yard that now sprawled between him and the deck. He could not see anything that looked promising.
The worm turned to himself and considered the state of things. His teeth had all cracked in the collision, and in his teeth-grinding since then, Worm had eroded them further. By now he had spit into the soil what shards he hadn’t swallowed. Still, if he opened his mouth, the wind stabbed at his teeth. Having not tested it yet, he wasn’t sure he would be able to speak. Only burst with sinister laughter. His mouth tasted of blood. The wound on his end where he’d been severed had started bleeding full-on again. If Worm looked back there was no mistaking where he had come from or where he had been, what for the blood path still stretching behind him across the land.
Still the worm had nothing to curb the flow from his end. He rolled onto his back and strove to think of other things. He had given up on moving forward, for now, though the haven of the damp-dark under the deck still pulled at him. Worm settled against the soil and strained his pinprick black eyes skyward to see what satellites had lingered in observation of the day. The worm noted the moon milkily hung in one corner of the sky, a slice of haze looking down on him like a smudge, coming on early into the day. Worm tried to ignore it. He knew the moon perched there, watching him. Threatening him.
Before Worm could deny the moon his flesh, for he feared that Moon would soon swoop down teeth first at him, the grasses shielding the worm from the rain that lightly began to fall suddenly parted beneath the crashing of harrowing winds to reveal the almost imperceptible path the worm had cut through the yard. Those overgrown grasses parted further to reveal the yard’s scalp, the topsoil, atop of which laid Worm upon his back. Above him hovered Blue Jay with her great, sweeping wings. Those wings sent crashing waves of wind over the grass that thrusted the severed, striped worm out of hiding, into the unperturbed light of day. Wind screamed against the worm’s gaping wound.
Raindrops pricked Worm and the land beside him, marring spots of soil to darkness in the earth. Worm laid there, looking up, too weak to scream, too weak to move, nearly drained of blood that had smeared out his path in a jagged line from the pinewood fence at the end of the yard. Worm simply broke into that wide, lip-splitting grin, and Blue Jay’s snapping beak closed over him, lifting him, carrying him off far and high. This gave Worm a glimpse of the world from that unreachable sky, and he was only grateful for something else to blame for his end. He had survived the crash, though not to tell of the tale. Neither had his comrades. From this he took solace.
The child that had just come onto the deck watched Blue Jay take off and dip into her sky-climbing flight. The child felt the small space they occupied on the earth tighten around them. They longed to feel the wind through a pair of wings, the earth passing in a blur far below. Like Worm had dreamt of once, not so long ago, and spent his life working toward.
The child crossed the yard, stepping barefoot through the overgrown grasses. They searched for what had engrossed Blue Jay. The child peered down between their toes at the earth, then dropped to their knees to comb the grass aside with their fingers. The child found a miniscule smear of blood atop the soil. Peeling back the grass, the child revealed the scalp of the earth once more, overlaid with a fine red string. The child clapped their hands and squealed with excitement. They had discovered a path: something to follow, a story to discover. The child relished stories but often had to invent their own, for their parents always seemed to be busy with something or someone that prevented them from sharing stories as they once had when the child was younger and asked less questions.
The child crawled, hands and knees, along the blood-smeared path, following the trajectory Worm had strained to make across the yard. The child reached the site of the crash in mere seconds. They kept their eyes trained on the earth as they moved along it, staining the knees of their jeans grass-green, soil-brown. At the end of the yard, where the grasses stretched and leaned against the deck-matching, cherry-stained fence, the child slowed to a stop and puzzled at the item they retrieved from a small break in the foliage.
It was a strange, lemon-sized ball of grass and weeds held together by mud. The child held the craft in their hands and peered closer, realizing the grass and weeds were not simply molded together in a clay of mud, but instead, if the child put the handful right up to their nose and squinted their eyes behind their glasses, they could tell those strands of grass and weeds were braided together. At the ends intricate knots held things in place. The child flipped the thing over, determined to figure it out. Was it some sort of nest? And if it was, who lived there? On the reverse side, a piece of trash the child recognized as a plastic Pringles can cover was woven to the cylindrical craft. Tiny holes allowed grass to pass through the plastic and affix it to the craft.
The child guessed what they were holding to be some kind of nest of the Faeries, one that had fallen or failed. What happened? Where had they gone? The child’s heart pulsed faster as they knelt in the grass and inspected another plastic piece. They guessed it to be some sort of window. The plastic was cracked vertically, and the child pulled the pieces apart. Perhaps the nest was perched on the fence post and fell, or maybe it was attacked, they reasoned. What, the child worried, if someone is trapped inside? The child shook the thing side to side, and something clattered to the grass between their feet. The child peered down and left the bandage tin there, more interested in what else, less human, remained inside the craft. The child worked quickly, shredding the intricate handiwork of the craft in seconds, work that had taken weeks out of lifetimes that spanned only a few years, at most. For grass becomes brittle in human hands when it remains resilient in others.
Nearby, a faint buzzing could be heard as a pair of damaged wings worked to right themselves. Nearby, a tiny pair of arms climbed while pooled onyx eyes observed the child open the craft like a fruit, pulling cracked ends apart to reveal its innards. Burning with helpless rage, the onyx eyes watched. Inside the shell, the child pulled apart woven-together hallways and sleeping quarters, the restroom, the kitchen, and lastly, the cockpit. Some of the material seemed wet, darker than the rest. Sticky, almost. The child swiped their palms on the seat of their jeans. Small corpses fell out of the pieces the child shredded, sending them scattering beneath the overgrown grasses of the yard where they’d churn back into soil or else never be seen again.
The onyx eyes saw the bodies fall and tried to feel nothing. The child had no trouble thinking nothing of these corpses, regular deaths they’d seen normalized on a daily basis. Insects, worms, arthropods, and the like did not bear much of a thought in the child’s mind, nor did their deaths. Such creatures could not have built such a craft. They did not receive the child’s consideration.
Instead, the child deduced, the faeries escaped.
The child discarded the remains of the grass spacecraft, throwing them over the fence and out of the yard for someone else to puzzle over. The child retreated back across the yard, bounded up the cherry-stained deck, pulled open the sliding glass door, and resigned to search inside for some other story waiting to be told.
After the sliding glass door latched, Yellowjacket emerged from his hiding spot inside a knot of wood on one of the fence posts overlooking the site of the crash. Yellowjacket started the long climb down. In the crash, he’d lost three of his six limbs and a good portion of his left wing. He was forced to take his time.
Yellowjacket spent the remaining light of the day finding the bodies of Grasshopper and Centipede. He buried them beneath the topsoil. Yellowjacket dug as deep as he could manage in his weakened state. Inches that spanned hours of work. Shivering in the waning light of the evening, Yellowjacket did not think to take a break. He searched until the moon overtook the sky, for he had not yet found his third and final companion, his favorite of the bunch, the most determined of them all: Worm.
Yellowjacket searched for Worm until Moon’s laughter cracked like a whip across the sky, when the darkness grew deeper and colder, and Yellowjacket knew in his heavy, tired heart that even in survival, he was alone.
He glanced down, taking stock of energy, blood loss, and what remained of his exoskeleton. The lowest of his three remaining limbs had given out while digging Centipede’s grave. Two limbs would do, Yellowjacket supposed. If he could climb the fencepost a final time it would be enough. He knew with the state of his body no one could blame him.
Not one.
Logan Anthony is a queer writer and transgender artist. Anthony holds a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing & English and works as a curriculum developer. Logan has poetry published or forthcoming in Thin Air Magazine, Oberon Poetry Magazine, Hive Avenue Literary Journal, Papers Publishing Literary Magazine, and Hare’s Paw Literary Journal. You can read their short stories in Stoneboat Literary Journal, The Write Launch, and Hare’s Paw Literary Journal.
Punt Volat 