The Worm
Poem by Ella Papenfus
Photographs by Bia Cintra
It’s dark. Darker than imaginable. It doesn’t see like us.
But that doesn’t matter. It moves.
Wriggling. The common term tied to the critter.
Wriggling is wrong. It does not wriggle. It undulates.
Undulating.
It’s death. No death that is imaginable. It doesn’t eat like us.
But that doesn’t matter. It eats.
It eats everything. Even those considered kin. It eats us.
It doesn’t discriminate. It decomposes.
Eating.
It surfaces. Not for long.
Danger casts shadows from the skies.
It must return to building.
Forging fungal connections to make life.
Making life.
It goes on.
Undulating. Eating. Making life.
Structuring a world that feeds worlds.
Left alone it rarely surfaces.
There is no need.
It goes on.
Undulating. Eating. Making Life.
There’s something coming.
Its body vibrates with increasing intensity.
It’s too much. There is light.
No dark. No death.
Torn from the ground it writhes.
Forced to surface.
Open to violence.
It tries to push itself back into the dark.
Writhing.
Heat. The sun beats.
Moisture is leached from its skin.
Moisture is leached from the world it symbiotically constructed.
Dry.
Cracked. There is no world there now.
No space for it to exist.
Surfacing suffocated it.
Surfacing suffocated all of it.
