Everybody’s Looking for Poisonous Worms

“They’re invasive,” Liss told me as she smushed the worm to goo beneath her shoe, “so it’s okay to kill them.”

After grinding the worm into the concrete, she took a picture of the resulting mess with her phone. The worm had been beautiful before and some of that beauty remained. It was a rainbow smear on the sidewalk. Somewhere in that smear, a bit of it still twitched. Liss noticed and put her heel on the spot, twisting it back and forth.

“But you’ve got to make sure they’re dead, like all the way dead. They can grow back from nothing.”

I looked away. It had just rained and I hoped to see a rainbow in the sky. “What’s the picture for?”

“You get paid for each one you kill.” I looked at Liss, and she rolled her eyes. “It’s true! You set up an online account, upload pictures for each worm, and you get paid. I’ve already made twenty bucks.”

“How long did that take you?”

“About a week of serious looking.”

I stared at the worm’s remains on the sidewalk. It already seemed like the dead worm was dissolving away in the puddles left by the rain. 

“If they grow back from nothing, couldn’t you just cheat?”

Liss cleaned her shoe off on the grass. “What do you mean?”

“Like farm them? Get a worm, cut it up into a dozen pieces, and when each piece grows into a new worm, kill that one and take a picture.”

“They’d know.”

The dead worm now looked like a bit of spilled oil in water. “How could they possibly know?”

Liss frowned at me. “They’d know.”

“Yeah, well I don’t want to kill worms.” Liss stared me down. “I don’t want to kill anything.”

Liss called me an ungrateful coward who didn’t care about the environment and then left me there. We’d planned on spending the whole day together, it being the weekend and both of us avoiding homework we’d have to rush to get done Sunday night. Now Liss was pissed at me, and I didn’t want to go home where Dad would force me to do chores, so instead I was left in the wet heat of August in Houston. We were in the Museum District, in that part of it overrun with trees, where even the houses seemed like tiny museums, ones where they’d probably shoot you if you even tried to look in through the windows. Liss would. I’d never.

I walked up and down the streets, taking turns whenever I felt like it, not really caring where I was going. I didn’t see any of the worms. I saw a dog vomiting in a yard. I saw a huddle of grackles eating the body of another grackle. An ambulance pulled away from a house, and the door of that house was left open when I passed it. I thought I heard crying from inside.

When I got hungry, I stopped at a convenience store. There wasn’t anyone inside. I waited fifteen minutes for someone to return to the front counter, but eventually just took a soda and a kolache. I didn’t have cash, so I couldn’t leave any. I thought I saw a worm inside the store near the fridges in the back , but it was a gummy that had fallen almost completely under a shelf. I took a picture of it and sent it to Liss. She didn’t even respond with an emoji.

When Liss’ parents had dropped us off, they’d been talking about some kind of school vacation. Some kind of work vacation, too. Or just some kind of general vacation for everyone, like from life as a whole. I couldn’t really listen because Liss kept showing me videos of cat fights. Cats fighting with snakes. Cats fighting with dogs. Cats fighting with robot vacuums. Cats fighting with other cats. I couldn’t tell if she found the videos exciting or shocking or disturbing. Even as I watched them, I tried not to think about them. I tried to think about what her parents were discussing, but I couldn’t tell if I should be excited or shocked or disturbed about that, either.

There was no one running around the running path circling Rice University. It was a Saturday and it should have been full of people trying to prove they’re healthy, showing off their new exercise wear while sucking down water from designer bottles. For a long time, I saw no one until a small crowd milled about a section of the path still  puddled from the rain. They stomped and crouched and pointed, taking photos and laughing while they did. I got close enough to see they were college students. The puddle must have driven out the worms from wherever they’d been hiding, a thick enough blanket of them on the ground to dazzle me even at a distance, as if a rainbow had been cut up with scissors and left to rot. A tall guy, arm muscles bulging from his t-shirt, saw me looking and said, “Get the fuck out of here, kid! These are ours.”

“I don’t want them,” I told him, but he was already back to scouring the ground for more worms. I watched for another few minutes. They reminded me of chickens scrabbling in the dirt for bugs and, well, worms.

I walked over to the Houston Zoo since I was already close by. Mom had given my brothers and me memberships after my parents divorced, and that’s what we often did on days with her. Sometimes she walked through with us. Sometimes she stayed at the café just outside the zoo proper and did work, letting us “have fun without her.”

I paused before crossing Main Street as more ambulances raced by on their way to the Med Center.  I’d heard of the worms before today, before Liss proselytized their destruction for money, but I didn’t understand them. I saw a beautiful picture of one looking more like art, a piece of ceramic or melted down crayons glazed with sugar. When my dad watched the nightly news there was a WormWatch segment with some thrown-together graphics, but I didn’t watch the news with him, just suffered it as background noise while I ate and tried to lose myself in a book.

The zoo was closed. Behind the walls roared what sounded like construction vehicles. I could hear coughing, like someone being sick. And there was a smell which grew stronger or fainter depending on the breeze. It was sweet, but rotten.

Death.

It smelled like death.

I wanted to throw up. Bile scorched its way up my throat, but only a dribble, only enough to itch and burn.

I headed towards home through Hermann Park, and it was like that’s where everyone was hiding. Families searched the grass, kids wielded plastic shovels and plastic buckets meant for a day at the beach, while parents wore kitchen gloves and took pictures with their phones, filmed it all with tiny camcorders while smiling and laughing like they were at Disneyworld. Lovers danced on the worms, the sidewalks already glistening with their mashed bodies, a layer of mucus that let their feet slide as if on a polished ballroom floor. I even saw a group of young children, daycare young, being overseen by a young woman. The children were wrapped completely in plastic except for their heads. The plastic was loose, and they must’ve been sweating in the heat, but the children yelped and cawed like animals on their hands and knees, rooting through the grass with their plastic-mitten hands, scooping up squirming rainbows to bring, clumsily, stumbling, to the adults. 

I didn’t like killing. Not even roaches or mosquitos.

Outside of the park, I could forget about the worms again. I could forget about everyone hunting those worms. It got late, and the streetlights shoved their reflections into the asphalt streets and the sidewalks. Every few minutes, I’d see a rainbow smear, sometimes a solid bit of worm that had been overlooked. Those bits moved, but so slightly it was easy to believe it was just my imagination.

I checked Liss’ socials. She didn’t post pictures of the worms, alive or dead—even I could see how people could simply steal her pictures to make their own money, say they found and killed them—but she posted pictures of rainbows, dozens and dozens of them, clearly marking her progress. Every once in a while, she’d throw in a selfie where she looked sweaty, and dirty, and so, so pleased with herself. I blanked my phone then shoved it in my pocket and tried to focus on what was around me.

A siren in the distance. Yelling a few blocks away which could be angry or excited. I didn’t hear many cicadas or frogs. They’d usually be screaming at this time of the year, this time of day. In the puddles along the curbs, there were swarms of something swimming, squiggly lines like cursive when you’ve just grown too tired to care.

Tadpoles, I decided, then stopped looking.

When I passed West Dallas, there was a fire a few blocks away towards the Whole Foods. They’d been ripping up the street in order to redo it better, construction vehicles blocking up the road for about a month now, and right in the center of that intersection the fire rose, a bonfire, something created. A crowd of people surrounded it, swaying and dancing. Gunshots. No one ran. More gunshots.

It took me another hour to get home. My clothes were soaked through with sweat, though night had brought on at least the illusion of coolness with the sun gone. The garage was open at my house with light flooding out onto the driveway and over the front lawn. My dad and my younger brothers dug into the ground with shovels and spades and even an ice cream scoop. There was a white bucket smack in the center of the driveway, and whenever they found what they wanted in the dirt and grass, they dumped it in.

When I reached the edge of the light, my dad frowned at me in welcome.

“You care about this family, right, son?”

He handed me a spatula. He pointed me toward the worms.