Dirt. Soil. Dirt. Food. More Food. Dirt. Soil. Light. Water. Dirt. Worms. More Worms. Even more worms. Sidewalk. Me.
Fingers made completely out of worms began to claw at the edge of a sidewalk. Pushing itself out of the poor soil, a hand of worms began to form. Held together by tension, dirt, and water, a body shaped itself in the park. My body. The sudden gaining of consciousness is a strange and disconcerting thing. The chorus of every worm in this park gently whispers in my ears as I feel my torso coming into being. I’m on the sidewalk now. The external worms hate the feeling of dry cement but what is done is done. I’m getting up, my legs wrapping around worms tightening. And I am standing in a park.
I look vaguely like a human. The hands could use a little work. The feet are cartoonish stumps. From a distance in the dark I look kind of like a body standing up. I think that is the best I will ever get.
The sun is just beginning to rise in the distance, a thin layer of orange and red over the foreign horizon, object after object basking in their stoic dedication to stillness. Buildings I think they’re called. Most likely skyscrapers. My memories are still patchy. I’m assembling every loose strand picked up by my worms in the days that they’ve all been alive. It hurts, there’s very little to work with right now but it is me, and it is good enough.
The immediate issue with being made out of worms is the sunlight. There is also the fact that I look like an absolute monster but baby steps first. I need two things, clothes and water. Preferably a near constant supply of water.
I begin to walk around this park happily. Nobody clings here to the center during the morning. It’s all overworked housewives jogging on the edges of fake nature. I find a happy little fountain with a pretty green angel placed above the pool below it. All the water is flowing from her hands. I jump into the fountain. Jumping is a strange coordination of mass proportions. It takes about one thousand worms in each leg to apply enough force towards the ground to get about two feet into the air. It is done however and the fountain mosions my drying skin.
Now is the time for clothes. I think there’s a donation bin for the salvation army right behind the public restrooms. It’s an old dumpster the city put a new label on so that they didn’t have to remove the dumpster. Getting to the dumpster was pretty easy, opening it not so much. At first I tried to grip the handle with my worms tightly, but that ended in my hand being cut in half and my worms having to resemble themselves. Worm tying around worm. Being too loose was even worse, I just stood there gently tugging at the thing, giving the worms of my hand friction burns bit by bit. A human handle was not the solution, so I pressed myself against the dumpster. Eventually I found a little hole, some place that was hit or unsealed, and I slipped my entire body through that quarter shaped entrance in the side of the donation bin.
The clothy labyrinth is weirdly like a womb. I get to shrivel around as an amorphous blob and get to choose how people make an impression of me. I have no face to judge and no gender to discern so clothes have to be my main form of self expression. About eighty percent of these clothes are from the dusty closest of dead grandmas and I do not wish to express myself as a dead grandma, so I must keep looking. There’s a pretty solid leather jacket with only one tiny hole, unlike the other three jackets. There is a pair of brown skinny jeans with one of the cuffs having “Andy x Riley” written and then scrawled over with by black marker. A “white” t-shirt, I am made out of worms and even I can tell something about the color of this white t-shirt gives it a stained quality all over. Finally there are bright cyan slippers and pink socks with cartoonish penises in a repeating pattern all over the pair. These are the only shoes and socks in the entire bin. I see why the city used a dumpster as a donation bin.
I popped out of the bin like a squirrel out of a trash can. The sun still hit the tiny cracks in my clothes and made my worms shrivel, but I can move them in shifts. Near the center of my being is a happy moist pocket, and worms move in and out of it with joy. After getting out of the bin I let myself wander through the park. I’ve seen every tree. I’ve touched every blade of grass. But from this perspective the lush, hand kept nature of everything has a new beauty to it. The vibrations of birds sung into the air and graced my “ears”. I don’t really have ears, just exceptional feeling across my whole body. I couldn’t help but adore every crack and crevice of this place. The closest thing I have to a home. And then I walked into a human.
I barely kept my form together as a few worms spilled out of my jacket. The human had its bleach blond hair up into a ponytail, and there were now worms rolling around in it. At first it made a motion with its lips to say, “I’m sorry”. That did not last long. The scream made one of my worms in my face burst into an explosion of goo that spilled onto her face. That did not make things better.
Soon the human was back to running but in the opposite direction. After a minute the screaming was so faint I could go back to listening to the birds. Letting myself entune with nature again, just from a nice new perspective. I never knew the sky could be so beautiful. It’s amazing what worms can do when we all come together. It went on like this until the faint haze of the dawn pushed into the clarity of the early morning. And with that clarity I was able to see the squad of humans in big blue suits walking right towards me.
It was strange, at first their approach to me was an approach for an animal, like I was irradiated and could not be touched. That gave away when I waved my hand at them. One of the officers, I assume they’re police officers I know very little about these things, came to stand in front of me and looked me up and down. It had a bushy brown mustache and a very bald head. A conversation between two people laying in the grass wearing corduroy dresses whilst discussing television speaks to me, it tells me this human looks like the stereotype of a cop. It most likely has a wife named Betty, a son who loves baseball, a daughter who is also there, and half of a child.
I believe I can speak if I focus very hard. It is a troubling process, the forcing of air into two fake cavities by worm muscle alone, but it works. Kinda. I sound like I’m dying and also being born at the same time so it’s a little strange. I start with the word I’ve heard the most, “HellO”.
The cop looks me up and down, raises his head, and says, “Oh, Hello sir. Ma’am? I’m going to use sir for now. I’ve been informed that you’ve covered yourself in worms and are walkin around in the park. I don’t mean to be a buzzkill but that’s technically a disturbance of the peace. Do you got an explanation for this?”
This guy and or the other human are obviously idiots, no one would actually be able to cover themself head to toe like this with living worms. It is bluntly obvious that I am the assembled consciousness of thousands of worms that have collected together in the middle of a park to take a human-like form that is now walking around in human clothes. It’s the logical answer and is also the truth. I of course try to convey this to my fellow living creature. I believe I have done quite well in saying, “I am made of worms”.
The man sighs and pulls out a pair of cuffs. He says, “alright buddy put’em there. You know the drill Mr. Worms.” I lift my hands up to him, he places the cuffs around the things that resemble wrists, and he constricts about thirteen baker’s dozens worth of worms off of my body as he cuts of my hands off. For a bit my hand just flaps there, like a fish out of water or a cop’s jaw that has just dropped, but soon it skitters back into myself via my feet. He looks slightly amused, mostly confused, and somewhat terrified. “Oh, you, you are made of worms”, his speaking is monotone with a slight tremble. He soon puts an arm around my shoulder and is just bringing me towards the car, “I’m sorry sir but we can’t have an unregistered individual just prancing about. Worms or no you’ve committed a very serious crime.”
I was just born and I am now inside of a police car. No longer do I get to feel the beauty of a summer breeze on my slithering flesh, I get to listen to eighties rock. And not good eights rock, the bad eighties that is in the public domain. Why do I know this? I remember, someone once explained to their girlfriend the entire history of rock in the eights and beyond. They didn’t have a girlfriend when they left the park. The inside of the car is barely not dusty enough to miss inspection. It smells of cigarettes and faintly of pot.
The cop says, “So, I don’t know how to say this to you but you’re under arrest. Do you know what that means?” I put my arm up into the air and have a group of thirty worms create a distinct thumbs up. “Please never do that again”.
The car ride is uneventful. I get to see beyond the park for the first time. People yelling at each other and a lot of rats. Maybe somewhere, deep under all of this, is a society of rat people just like me. My worms shiver. It’s dirtier out on the streets but not much dirtier than the park. Just because you can’t see all the trash that’s under the grass doesn’t mean it’s not there.
The police station, what I assume is a police station I’ve never actually seen before, is a towering building. Big granite walls and vaguely greco-roman columns. I think half of the city’s budget was put into this one building.One of my worms overheard that statement once in the park and I infer this statement as strikingly true.
I am brought out by two men grabbing the worms that make up my shoulders and shoving me through a door. In the waiting room is a small grandma with a young boy in a blood covered Paw Patrol t-shirt, an older man with a combat knife stuck in his arm, and a rabbi in all pink. They all look at me, the grandma is the most surprised of the gang, but they soon all go back to being consumed by their own course in the police station. I’m not allowed to be in the waiting room. They shove me into an oversized closet with a mirror to my right and a table in front of me.
I get left in here for a couple hours. My skin is feeling really dry. There is only so many times I can shuffle worms around my body until the mud inside of me turns to brittle dirt. Finally a man with a clean shaved undercut, a messy bushy mustache, a forest green suit, and a mustard bow tie sits down in front of me. He has a briefcase and a smile on his face. He says, “Mr. Worms, It’s nice to meet you, I am John Mosses, your court-appointed lawyer. And you are being charged with two counts trespassing, one count of disturbing the peace, and five hundred thousand, four hundred, and two different accounts of non identification with the United States government”. My name is not “Mr. Worms”.
I was just born this morning and I don’t even have a name yet. They can’t just give me a name for being born. I like the name Alex. I say, “My name is Alex”.
John shakes his head up and down for half a minute too long, “Mkay Alex, and what’s your last name?”.
I did not get this far. “My name is Alex Alex”.
John looks at me for exactly forty three seconds longer than would be normal. I think he’s decided to treat this like every other case, instead of worrying over the complexity of what it means to be talking to a person made of worms. I respect that. John says, “Okay Mr. Alex Alex, can I just call you Alex? I’ve looked over the records and so far, there is no precedent for any of this. A man tried to represent his own cow in a marriage despites in 1857 but that was thrown out. That’s both good and bad news, since it means we’re going in blind. It’s kinda like a coin toss. Do you know what a coin toss is?”
I nod my head. John continues, “Good, so I’m going to lay everything out for you. The court is counting every single worm in your body as in violation for non identification, but they’re charging just you, Alex, with trespassing and disturbing the peace. If we can prove that you are just one person then that’ll make this entire thing a whole lot easier.” He’s attempting to smile but in actuality he’s just showing off his gums and off-white teeth.I finally notice that his left canine is made of gold. Not gold, fake gold. A bit of it is chipped and you can see the iron-like substance underneath the fake tooth. I say, “I’m not just one person. I’m not even an I. We think we makes more since.”
Internally, this voice, it’s easier to say I, but we’re not really an I. This is just the amalgamation of every electrical current in all of these worm bodies coming together to make what resembles a personality based on the lived experiences of said worms. Thinking about that really only makes my mind hurt though. John finally stops showing off his gums as he looks at me, “So you are,y’all are? I don’t care what you are, we need to get through all this. You’re not even a United States citizen, or a citizen period. I’m surprised they’re putting this to trial at all to be frank.”
I am just worms. I will always just be worms. And as worms I remember every sad depressing political conversation that has ever happened in my park. Including an older man yelling about the fourteenth amendment. “Under the fourteenth amendment, isn’t anyone born on US soil legally a citizen?”
John finally smiles at me for the first time.
Before the courtroom I drank a massive amount of water. Drinking is a bad way to put it. I tear off an office cooler and dump it onto my body. The orange cream colored suit and vomit yellow tie that John got me are both drenched. John cries a single tear but it’s his job to not be angry at me.
Walking into the courtroom is so surprising. Everyone so far has treated me as if I was a slightly strange adult human. Now there are cameras trained on my face and women in blue suits pushing microphones into my face. There are scientists who are trying to take samples off me. One of them cries when they get a single worm. That worm’s name is Jarry. He’ll be dead before the end of the day from old age.

Inside the courtroom is a small crowd, the jury, a judge covered in cobwebs, and the prosecutor. The prosecutor’s frizzy black hair is the only thing hiding the rings under her eyes as she has seemingly infinite coffee in a cup. Trying to prosecute a bunch of worms must be a really hard job.
I can feel the UV lights in the courtroom burn and blister my worms as I sit in an uncomfortable oak chair. Court is, at its core, the most boring battle I have ever seen. In the park, in the quiet of the night, there are times when creatures come out to bite and snatch at each other. Coyotes and feral cats scraping with one another. This legal battle is more boring than watching two squirrels tussle over an acorn. I am asked a lot of unhelpful questions like “Was I created?”, “How am I able to talk?”, “Have I been sent to spy on the American People?”. I don’t even know what the word spy means. Even thousands of worms can’t learn every word in the English language from a park.
The beginning of the court battle is a grueling slog of answering one single question, do I even have the right to an attorney? Animals don’t sue humans so the legal rights of the forest are entirely untapped, probably on purpose. The conclusion is that I, the entire being, can be deemed a legal entity, but each one of my worms are themselves not a legal entity. Whatever that means.
John told me during recess that, “There’s you, a hundred thousand worms, and then there’s the concept of you, Alex Alex. According to the Legal system. You are Alex Alex and your worms basically have the same rights as my cells.” He could have said the word “worms” fifteen times and it would have had the same effect.
The next task was defining what rights I did have if I had any. The prosecutor made great strides with the beginning of this argument, she talked about how “Despite the appearance of consciousness, how do we know this body will itself fully be able to function in the confines of a human society?”.
John’s rebuttal, according to himself, was brilliant, “If Mr. Alex agrees to swear an Oath, Agrees to pay taxes, and understands both of these concepts, can Mr. Alex then have the rights of any other man born on this American soil?”. The judge, from her high skyscraper-like position, had been a monk this entire time. Her eyes had practically been closed and her words were soft and slow. She took much time to deliberate on every statement. When she heard the words “pay taxes”, her eyes beamed. It’s as if the entire crux of her existence is based on this one solemn fact. Pay taxes.
I was shoved out of the courthouse with my clothes, a “Social security number”, and a list of possible jobs.
Nobody likes having a bunch of worms make their coffee, but that’s the way that it is. A block away from the park is the café I work for, “Bean by You for You”, or just “Bean You”. It’s owned publicly by a young couple in their late thirties. Privately it’s owned by the subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a company that owns seventy five percent of all cafés in the world. This is all according to my co-worker Terrance. He smells like the park, that’s why I talk to him.
Working at a café isn’t that bad after the first two weeks. At first all the regulars are surprised to find a shambling pillar of worms taking orders and giving small talk, but sooner or later they start to say “Hi, Alex! Can I get my usual?”. In fact, that’s kind of everybody. The worst reactions I get are always from people who never come back.
My first two days out and about in the world I got questions after question, from reporters to grandpas to government agents, but after a while everyone just gets used to the new normal. The whole system just can’t stop for a couple of worms.
I even have my own apartment, it’s a nice ten foot by ten foot box with a lot of dirt. I pay three thousand dollars a month for it after taxes. It’s the closest thing I can get to living in the park in the city.
I honestly expected something beautiful after all this. A fun exciting tour of science and spectacle. Something worth the time of day. Now I wake up every day just to make bean juice. It’s a thrilling existence of hard work but it’s not exactly what I planned.
I’m back in the park now for the first time in one month. The grass gently brushes side to side in the wind. The sun is high in the sky, eating at my body as always. A couple kids are playing with a red and blue butterfly kite. Couples walk and people talk. Smiles and soft severed ice cream, fresh dirt and free talking. People talk differently here in the park. In the cafe it’s all closed off, there’s a snob writing a screenplay in the corner and an unhappy couple break things off next to the window over a spilled iced mocha. Here, it’s all sunshine. I put my feet in the grass. I let my wormy appendages feel real fresh dirt for the first time in weeks. It is borderline heavenly. Slowly, worms begin to dig at the dirt, my appendages sinking in more and more into the dirt. Soon enough my legs are both deep in the soil. Then my torso. Then my head. Then there is just dirt. Dirt. Moisture, Sunshine. Dirt. Moisture. Worms.