When I was very young I used to go fishing with my step dad, John.  I sat beside him in a small metal boat as he demonstrated how to hook a worm. He was an experienced fisherman and made the gruesome business look simple, even painless (one two, one two, and through and through).  The worm hardly seemed to notice, it wriggled around exactly as it had been before being plucked from it’s tub of soil and impaled on a hook. None could tell if the wriggling meant anything at all.  He dropped his hook into the water and it was my turn. I picked a worm at random from the tub. Perhaps my hands were too small or too clumsy but pinching it between two fingers, as John had done, was not enough.  It took five fingers and all my concentration to contain its agonized writhing.  It, The Worm, who had no power whatsoever to comprehend its new position in the world, or to save itself from the imminent horrors about to be inflicted upon it, squirmed frantically. A worm is a simple thing, one imagines its desires are to stay moist and crawl around in dirt eating whatever worms eat. It found none of this clutched in my dry, salty, hands. It wished to return to a state where things made sense, it’s home, where sensory data corresponded to established patterns allowing it to navigate  its would and flex it’s Will to Power. It would not hold still, so I held it tighter. The wrinkles circling its form inverted as the pressure in its body increased to the point of exceeding the strength of one of it’s two ends, and all at once, all that was once contained within the skin of the worm was evacuated onto my thigh.

Something between a liquid soaking into my jeans, and solid, definite forms which once constituted a whole, still pulsing, still squirming with a purpose. The ruined pitiful creature still held its desires intact. Still held memories of moist, cool darkness, of safety somewhere beyond the salty claws of this idiot god who had arbitrarily chosen it for hell. It still fought. I sensed in its scattered constituents that this desire to return to that state of order, now fragmented, would, if added up, amount to an even more innocent desire- that to simply be whole again. to be gathered back up and placed back on its normal path. Never mind that distant home, it would gladly squirm in my hostile grip for the rest of its days so long as it could BE again.

“lets us return to that place where ‘we’ were called ‘I’. lets us return to that home where each of us worked together to make a humble miracle squirm happy and free, where the burden and loneliness of individuation was an unknown unknown.”

That home which had been flung into the water by reflex and with a disgusted terror, and a girlish scream, to be devoured without hesitation by the fish down below. I stood up in the boat and nearly fell out frantically flapping my jeans, sending the former tenants down where, presumably, they faced even greater divisions before finally becoming parts of a new whole.