Jo Swingler lives in Edinburgh for now but hasn't always. Her work has appeared in Aesthetica, Flashquake, QWF, GoldDust as well as several anthologies.

All part of nature (November 20, 2009. Issue 11.)

He watches the worm muscle itself out of the ground next to him and squeeze its way onto the scorched heat of the path, and he almost wants to stamp on it, flatten the pink meat of its head to a greasy smear, like he had as a kid. But he doesn’t. Just watches it shrug onto the path from the cool ground, catch on the baked-in heat of the paving. Maybe he’ll keep watching it to see what happens. Watch as the juice sucks out through the thinness of its skin, leaching into the concrete. Slowly slowly baking it to a husk. Will it feel that, its liquid-life sucking out? Is there enough sense in that wormy glob of a head to think and realise and feel? Is that juice like blood?  Like when he’d done it that time. Sliced into the chunked-meat of his arm just to see.. To feel. And again, carved in. Deeper with each slice, because the box-cutter was too sharp and he’d not felt it. Not felt it enough. Watched where the skin spilt, and the white fat oozed glistening below flesh. And he thought how it wasn’t his arm that was doing this, splitting and opening. Wasn’t his arm that was ruptured, but an experiment on another arm, someone else’s – a cadaver’s maybe. And so he’d done it again. Studying, observing the peeled back lips of the skin, the almost-to-the-bone gleam. A suggestion of muscle and tendon. Revealed. Intriguing. He’d been thinking about maybe starting on the other, when the feeling kicked in. The chain of sensation having finally hit his brain along too-dulled nerves. Swung back like a blunt axe to collide with every fibre of sense and he saw the blood drip drip drip onto his bed redder than he’d ever known while the pain screamed out too loudlouderlouder and breathing hard against it breathing gasps gasping

So now he watches the worm. Wonders if a bird will swoop down, a blackbird, and peck it up and carry it off. A part of nature. All just a natural thing that they won’t tell you about on TV anymore. They just cut-away obsessively from that just-before-death-moment of teeth ripping flesh, won’t even tell you that there is this order –  that there’s you, and there’s them and they fucking stab you up and carry you off and feed you to their young and you die. They’d done that to him in the past, but he’d wriggled free each time, just free enough to fall and drop to a smash on the ground, but still going, still alive, enough life left. She’d been the last to try it.  And he’d gone along with her. Pretended he hadn’t known what she was planning. That she’d trap him and make him what he wasn’t. Strip him down till there was nothing left but a shred of skin and a sucked-out hollow of bone. Gone along with her as far as he’d needed. Only as far as that. Made sure of it. Made sure she knew it was him, all down to him, and she’d not forget that. No. Not ever.  And she hadn’t. And neither would anyone else. Not ever.

All part of nature.

He sits on the grass where the worm was. Where the other worms are. Part of creation, part of it all. Gathering in the feel of it.. It is this. Connecting. He is in the sky and the air and the grass and the earth and the soil and that bird and the tree and its leaves and the veins in those leaves and the bugs on the leaves on those trees and the breeze and the worm. Especially that worm.  That bastard fucking worm.

But now they’re coming again, now, to make him do things. Shouting white, in white, of white, across the world to him to make him ‘do things’. Although they say ‘ask’ but it’s not ‘asking’. ‘Suggest’, no, it’s not that either. They make him sit here, outside in nature and the world, and then they come and they say no don’t sit there come here inside and sit by this window no sit by this table and watch the world from there it’ll be good for you or here by this man who he hates and who pisses himself on Tuesdays although maybe they don’t say that. But yes, he still knows when Tuesdays are. Still knows.

And now they ‘suggest’ he come in as it’s too hot.

But he will come in now, as it’s too hot for him. Not for them. Not for them thinking it’s too hot for him, but because he says it’s too hot for him. It’s too hot and he’ll burn in the sun and the scars on his arms itch in the heat.

But before he goes, he stands and looks at the worm.  It’s almost to the other side of the path now. Epic. Watches it trapped in the heat of the paving slab. How it struggled to get to that point, that point in its life against everything, and then raises his leg and brings his foot down hard.

 ‘But you were always fucked,’ he says

Then he wipes the pink smears from his slipper onto the grass and goes in.