Ross George March 13th 2024 I am a worm

I am a worm, and not a man. Sans ears, sans teeth, sans nose, sans almost everything. I’ll
never be an old man now, I have at most two years to live. I wanted to write a novel. I
knew I had a book in me. At least my autobiography. I’m in my garden, the passing trains
are vibrating me, but my sight receptors can only make out darkness under the trees and
light upon the lawn. Night and day, that lovely Cole Porter song. I’ll never play that again.
Even if you picked me up and placed me on the piano keys, I’d just lie there, dry up and die.
All I do now is pushed by instinct: seek moisture, digest my weight in soil daily, leave behind
a trail of casts instead of words and music, and slime up against other earthworms to
procreate. If you cut me in half, I don’t double, I die. I crave dark soil, where vital wetness
lies, that keeps me slick and lithe. I dread the dessicating sun. I am terrified of death-crush
from the gardener’s muddy gumboot, death-slice by the sharp metal spade, or death-rend
from the frantic terrier’s claws. I concertina myself through the cold damp earth, fearing
the clumsy insults of children’s fingers probing, pulling and flinging away my spineless body.
No longer a bookworm, I burrow away from the beak of the early bird. I am a worm, and
not a man, yet still I want to live.