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Fiction Issue 1

Worms

“Revising this story was an ongoing process, like most of what I write is. Working with Cyd helped because it was great to have feedback from someone else on my work. I usually find that my stories are much better after revising them, but I also have to be careful not to lose some of the original charm from what I wrote the first time, because sometimes the way I choose to phrase things is more authentic the first time around.”

Worms

     That moment was just like any other moment. I was surrounded by dirt, going nowhere in particular, having been nowhere in particular, and coming from nowhere. I don’t remember a beginning, I’m not really sure how I came to be, and I don’t have any friends to tell me, either. There are only three things I really enjoy in life: sitting still, moving, and squirming around. The last one, squirming around, isn’t necessarily always enjoyable, but it’s a means of getting from one situation to another, and therefore it is necessary for getting to the more enjoyable parts of life. But really, the whole question of what I enjoy is unimportant because my life is not about joy. It’s about eating my way through the earth and excreting it out the back end. In some ways it hardly matters whether I’m here or somewhere else because it’s all the same six inches under the surface. Sometimes it feels like the whole world belongs to me. My life is about fertilizing––taking something and making it better than it was. Where there are worms, there is excitement. Flowers, healthy roots, and big tall trees.
     So here we are. As far as I know I’m in a pretty good spot because I’m eating well and the earth isn’t hard and full of rocks. I would even say I’m enjoying myself, if such a thing were possible for a worm. There’s been rain recently, and the flowers are in bloom. I can tell because their little white tendrils have reached down and are splayed out, soaking up the water. I can sense how beautiful they are as I slime by, even though I’ve never seen a flower in my life. I’m not a praying worm, but I do think to myself, as I move along beneath the flower bed, that I am glad to be alive, and that I’m glad to be a part of the garden.
     From my coordinates of darkness, moisture and soil, I hear something from above. Seconds later, I feel a sharp stabbing pain. There is a flash of confusion and then I’m being pulled up through the ground in jerky motions toward the surface. I use all my strength to resist, but the dirt crumbles around my body and brightness leaks in. I try to pull myself back into the ground, grabbing onto any traction I can, but before I know it I am flying through the air. I can hear wings beating around me, but aside from that there is utter silence and blinding white light.
     In that moment, I couldn’t really think about anything at all. I was squirming, which is more of a reflex than any kind of conscious reasoning. We worms have so little we can do to defend ourselves from the birds, the fishhooks, and the wrath of god, that our only response is to writhe around and hope they’ll just give up. Other species might deal with their fear of death in more creative ways, but that’s only because they have fewer predators and more time to contemplate these things. That’s great, more power to them, but I must add that the act of squirming is underrated as a coping mechanism. It makes us feel like we are in control, and in some cases, it can actually delay death––by wriggling out of a bird’s beak, for instance. 
     This is not what happened, though. What happened is I was carried up into a tree near the garden and set down in a nest. I could hear the deafening roar of tiny birds, and squirming wildly in the floor of the nest, I was divided into thirds. When my squirming slowed, the mother fed me to the three anxiously awaiting little birds, who swallowed me and were quiet. My body provided nourishment for their tiny bones and the rest of me was transformed into fertilizer, dropped from the nest, and absorbed near the tree’s roots. The last sight I saw, as my head fell from the mother’s beak, was the flowers blooming in the garden.

My name is Russell Snapp and I’m a senior majoring in Psychology with a minor in Creative Writing. I had never taken a creative writing class until last year during winter quarter, but after taking that class I decided I really wanted to write more, and eventually chose to go for a minor in creative writing. As a senior, there wasn’t much time left for me to fit in a minor, so I elected to fill pretty much all of my classes that weren’t going towards my major with writing and English classes. I feel fortunate to have discovered writing and the awesome English department at DePaul, even though I got a late start. I think writing creatively––fiction is what I’ve focused on so far––is a great way to express yourself because it’s fun to play around with words and make your story come to life, especially when the form is so open-ended and you can really write about anything. It’s way better than the writing in other normal classes.