Topsoil Terror

All her life Willy has been working hard with her friends and family to keep the soil system a sanctuary. Inspired by good work ethic and efficiency, she takes fondly to her new neighbors, the humans. But as time passes, efficiency starts to crack, and with it the world around her…. This Halloween Willy has her first run in with Spooky Season. A baptism of fire, this takes spooky to the next level. This is true horror.

“We wouldn’t be here without you, keep up the good work,” Azai¹, commanding officer of the 13th ant worker brigade, called over to Willy² who had just reached the top soil surface following a long day of digging channels.

These moments were Willy’s favorite part of the work day.

Not only did her final push to the surface epitomize her mastering of yet another rough day of work. A few times she had already been asked to channel the ground nearby the ants’ colony so as to guide the drainage away from the home of their beloved queen Raina.

The ants’ approval of their hard labor was something Willy cherished. A working class earthworm, nothing inspired her more than watching those tiny ants carry objects several times their size, day in, day out, in their incredibly organized and structured ways. The only thing Willy held in higher esteem than queen Raina was her own family.

Her partner Quintessa³ and their children, Tamora⁴, Kyrah⁵, and Conley⁶ gave her life full meaning.

Willy nodded towards Azai in appreciation and said “I’ll be digging eastward, hope to see you again tomorrow morning!”

Then she returned home to the little tunnel she had created several years ago under the roots of a big oak tree near a pond. Willy chose this location when Quintessa was about to lay eggs so their future family could always have a moist and protected place that supported them.

“Tamora is sick again,” Quintessa informed her upon her arrival, “and Kyra is still upset about our neighbors.”

Willy looked around the tunnel with concern and disapproval. “Where is Conley,” she asked sharply.

“Still out there in the sand…”, Quintessa sighed.

“The young worm simply won’t learn from his brother’s misfortune. Tamora has been sick for two weeks now because the school grounds are too dry, and yet there goes Conley, insistent on proving to his friends that he is the worm that can spite the sand,” Willy scoffed.

Then she turned to Kyra. “How often have I told you kids that we need to be open to change. Personally, I think nothing better has ever happened to us than these humans moving upstairs. Their farming methods are too noisy for the ravens and the vibrations from their machinery drive away the moles. For the first time in my life, I can go about my daily work safely and you don’t have to worry about your Mapa while she’s gone!”

“Nobody wants you to get eaten, Mapa.” Kyra whined, “But you weren’t there when one of their blades almost cut Tamora in two! And now it smells horrible here because they started spraying all this strange stuff on their fields and the river is carrying it straight past our home. The fish hate it too.”

“Humans want to work more efficiently, just the same way I like to improve my performance as a digging earthworm. Don’t judge their ways, I’m sure they have their reasons. Maybe that spray smells lovely to them! Besides, I’ve instructed all of you to notice vibrations in the ground and go deep whenever you feel them! Tamora is the youngest, I have said many times you need to…”

SWOOSH! A wave of muddy water flushing into the tunnel interrupted Willy’s speech as Conley came crashing to a halt at a wall.

“Where in the name of the Almighty Annelida⁹ are you coming from?” Willy asked sternly.

“I figured I might be late, so I took a quick detour from the sandbank to the mud puddle and dug a direct channel connecting it to our home path so the water would flush me through quickly,” Conley said triumphantly.

“You are neither the king of the sandworms, nor are you a rotifer, so stop acting crazy,” Willy laughed. “Now go and take your other Mapa and younger siblings to dinner under the oak roots near the scarecrow the humans have erected, so the ravens and moles won’t bother you. I will meet you in the morning after my night shift”

The family followed her instructions and crawled off.

As Willy set off again, she soon noticed that human activity had made her work a lot easier. The ground had been freshly plowed so it was soft and easy to dig through. What’s more, the top soil was now structured in furrows throughout the entire corn field, easy to navigate. “Quite the organized beings. Strong work ethic too, reminds me a bit of ants,” Willy thought to herself as she kept on digging new channels vertically.

By the morning she had fulfilled her duty and set eastward to connect her final channel with the surface. When she finally managed to break through, the sweet warm feeling of sunshine kissed her anterior. In the distance she noticed the ants.

“And here I thought I had a productive night,” she shouted across the plain in admiration.

“We ……. are …… moving!” Azai wheezed.

“I can see that — even faster than I had expected,” replied Willy.

“No, no, ……….I mean ….moving …..away……. The ant hill…. the whole colony ……. we need to start over.”

“Wow, you truly are the masters of perfection. Did you find an even better home for queen Reina,” Willy interrupted.

“It’s all gone! T-t-they started d-d-digging! All along the edges of the forest… the rains… it’s all awash….destroyed…”

Azai was visibly in shock. Willy did not know what to make of this. “Who did? Worms? Don’t they know we are here to do the necessary work underground? Send me to them, I can fix it,” Willy said.

“I..I.. I wish ….”

“Oh no, don’t tell me the moles have returned?”

“I would give three of my legs for moles, Willy.” Azai was finally catching his breath, yet his voice became increasingly difficult to hear as the ants continued rushing further into the distance.

Willy tried to get an answer to what Azai was alluding to, but the ants were already out of reach. Willy shrugged and turned around.

On her way back home, she pondered the sudden loss of her most prized neighborhood friends and wondered where they would move. It could not be that far, right?

She was so deep in thought that it took her too long to feel that the ground was shaking, stronger and stronger the closer she got to her home.

The moment she realized, all of a sudden, a set of gigantic, round, sharp blade-like metal sheets appeared right behind her.

She tried to dig deep as quickly as possible, but the metal blades raced towards her.

She breathed heavily, scared for her life. She kept digging.

SLASH! Within a split second, a sharp pain went through Willy’s tail. Like a razor blade, the human industrial machine above her had just sliced off the point of her posterior end.

Willy was wailing in pain. The machine thundered along the furrows. Willy caught her breath. She inspected the wounds. She crawled forward with every move hurting as she dragged herself on.

She heard the thundering sound returning. The machine was on its way back in her direction. Willy dug as deep as she could and this time, she barely escaped the next barrage from above.

When she finally reached home, her family’s tunnel was empty. Their only traces were the channels they had dug on their way towards the oak’s roots.

Willy followed in Quintessa’s tracks. She noticed the ground getting increasingly dry the further she went. Then she stopped and stared ahead. She could not believe her eyes.

A sea of fungi carcasses lay ahead of her. All the little sponges that had flourished here under the oak tree’s root system had dried out. She had always loved this walk. It had felt so lively. Now, it had been transformed into a tunnel of doom.

A foul odor filled the air as she crawled onwards past the dead fungi.

“If they could not find food in the fungi colony, then they must have gone much further, ” Willy thought to herself.

As she ventured on, she began to realize that the odor that was filing the channels became stronger while the soil turned increasingly dry.

“I must be right below the northern lettuce field now,” she thought. “In these conditions, they could not have gone much further.”

But what was that?

She heard a strange noise coming from the bent ahead. It sounded like moans.

“Hello, Quintessa, is that you?,” she called out.

“Mmrrwwwwhh,” a response came.

Willy moved forward, realizing that the smell and dryness of the soil became almost unbearable.

As she turned a corner, her heart almost stopped.

A worm-like creature covered in red and white bumps, from posterior to anterior, with an oddly thick slime dripping from half of their body lay in front of her.

They¹⁰ were twisting weakly, unable to move on, groaning in agony.

“Graaaahhhhh,” they moaned. “Turn around, save yourself.”

“Who are you, what happened to you? Have you seen my family?” Willy asked.

“I don’t have much time left….. I am Ajal Ajal⁷…..eeeuhhhhhhh….. I… I have been poisoned…. The ground here….. it’s toxic.”

“I need to bring you to the surface, Ajal! You need help!”

“There is no time. I am done for. Look at me, I am transforming into something unnatural. Get out while you can!”

“But my family, they must be here somewhere, I have followed their tracks, they -”

“Everything beyond this point is lost, worm friend.”

“I need to find them,” Willy exclaimed.

She looked at Ajal’s pulsing body. It was a horrific sight. No worm should end like this, Willy thought. She had never seen anything like it.

It became clear as she tried to push Ajal that there was little use in the exercise.

In their last dying breaths, Ajal sighed “Almighty Annelida, be with my doomed friend here.”

Willy was appalled. What had happened to Ajal? Where was her family? Why was the ground so hard and dry? Was this stench of death what Kyra had been smelling all the way back home?

In search of her family, Willy decided to push on.

All of a sudden, she heard stomping sounds from above the surface. The ground began to shake. A thundering voice was shouting.

“I’m cutting them into pieces, but they keep moving! We need to exterminate them if we want to save our lettuce! I don’t know why it’s not growing properly”

“Oh no!” Willy’s stomach almost turned in fearful anticipation of what may be happening above. What was going on all around her? What was happening to her peaceful home?

She began digging upward to investigate the scene. With the last bit of strength she had left she reached the surface.

There was nothing but deserted land and a few choppy looking, sad lettuces. But what was that?

Red drops dripped down on Willy. All around her big blood drops were raining down on the soil.

SQASHHHHHHHH!!!!

Willy ducked away just in time as a massive snail tail hit the floor. Willy was in absolute shock. She could not believe the terror unfolding in front of her eyes. A human, probably middle-aged, who had a look of terrifying anger on his face stood right in front of her. Willy had never witnessed a comparable expression in the animal kingdom. Scissors in his left hand and salt in his right hand, the man was picking up snail after snail, cutting them into pieces, dropping them on the floor and tossing salt all around him.

Willy stood in the middle of a terror scene. Dozens of snails moaning, wheezing in their last breaths. The salt melted their bodies as they screeched in unfathomable cries of pain.

The sky was turning black with storm clouds. Rain soon began to drop to the earth. The storm intensified quickly and the rain flushed the field’s furrows with snailblood.

As Willy looked over the horrific scene, her eyes wandered on. And then she saw. No! NO!

Between the farmer’s fingers, Tamora was being choked, his posterior marked by similar blisters that Ajal had been covered in. Willy called out to him. Just as Tamora’s eyes wandered over to meet her Mapa’s gaze, the farmer crushed Tamora’s anterior and worm blood splashed all over his hands.

Willy cried out! She was still in complete shock when from her right side Kyra’s voice reached her ears.

“Mapa. You need to find Mapa Quintessa and get out of here. It’s the end of this place.”

Willy turned to see where the voice had come from. There, crushed between the bottom of a spade and a rock lay her beautiful daughter. Half of her body was missing.

She moaned: “Find Mapa and get out”

“We need to take you……” Willy said, but as she saw the blood streaming out of what was left of her body, she knew this would be a futile endeavor. “Where is Conway,” she asked.

Kyra uttered her last dying words: “Conway tried to save his brother’s life. He would not stop before it was too late. The man trampled him to death in anger.” She took one last big breath: “We love you Mapa. Please find Mapa Quintessa. Start over.”

Willy wailed.

The man ran inside his farm house as the rain increased even more and the ground turned into mud.

Willy was now in the middle of a perfect storm. The dried out soil could not hold anything of substance and the water flushed everything away including Willy.

Amidst all this debris, Willy found a lettuce leaf to crawl onto as the flood splashed through the furrows.

Willy watched as the topsoil everywhere around her began to run off and her entire life’s work washed away. The menacing flood took the muddy water and all the debris straight into the nearby pond. Along with it all, the awful stench of death.

When Willy reached the pond her lettuce leaf float came to a standstill. Caught between some twigs, Willy sank to the ground. She cried.

She had lost her three amazing children. Her home had been transformed in ways she could not even understand. Her life’s work — gone. And still no trace of her partner.

As she sat there at the low point of her life in the pouring rain, a fish swam up to her. “My friend. You need to get out of here. Can’t you smell? This pond is turning into a massive fertilizer pool. All this chemical runoff is going to kill us all soon. I’m stuck here, but you, you can dig away my friend.“

Willy was exhausted beyond measure. Her emotional distress paired with her physical pain felt overbearing. Only one thought kept her going.

“Quintessa,” she sighed. “I need to find her.”

“CAAAWWW” a searing sound sniped through the air.

The fish quickly dove under as a raven shot down from the sky and landed near Willy.

“CAAAAWWWWW”

Willy watched the massive creature in terror.

“Quintessa? You speak of an earthworm?”

Willy almost did not dare to ask.

“Did you eat her?”

“Eat her?? CCAAAAAAWWWW,” the raven responded full of indignation. “I saved her! She was trapped, half stuck in the hard ground when I found her near that farm. I dug her out and took her to a forested area some flight hours south so she can live away from human terror”

“She’s… she’s my love. Can you bring me there?”

“Yes, I will. Let’s go, you can rest in my beak.”

Despite the rather obvious reasons for mistrust this statement evoked in Willy’s mind, she agreed. What other option did she have left? Her home had become inhabitable. This was probably her best bet of ever seeing Quintessa. And besides, if the raven wanted to eat her, he would have already done so.

During the flight Willy and the raven had some time to get to know each other. Azriel⁸, as the raven was called, expressed his condolences for Willy’s traumatic experiences.

Eventually Willy summoned the courage to ask what she considered the most obvious question of all: “Say, Azriel, how come you want to help me and not eat me.”

“Willy, if I eat the last remaining worms, this place will never be the same again. You and Quintessa need to start over. Your contributions, they are just like those of the ants, the moles and all the other critters that live in the topsoil. We need you to keep up the good work to keep this system alive. We wouldn’t be here without you.”

For the first time since her life had taken such a dramatic turn Willy almost smiled.

Shortly after, she found an even better reason for joy. Azrail began to descend. “We’re about to land. Look, down there near the pine tree!”

Willy’s eyes filled with tears, but this time, it was in relief. There she was, her anterior greeting from a freshly dug tunnel. Quintessa.

Willy’s fate doesn’t have to be this way. If we as a society do our best to act sustainably, from the places of production to the consumers, the species of this world can continue living in the paradise they call home and keep the ecosystems that humans rely on functioning. Let’s act better and aim bigger! If we don’t do it for the worms, do it for ourselves. It’s our best shot at sustaining our own existence as well.

References:

1. ‘Strength’ in Hebrew
2. ‘Resolute protector’
3. ‘Essence’ in Latin
4. ‘Innocent’
5. ‘Far-sighted’ in Persian
6. ‘Strong willed,’ ‘wise,’ ‘Hero’ — Irish/Gaelic
7. The end of something’s period/the time of someone’s death
8. Based on Azrael
9. Annelid(a)
10. Earthworms are hermaphrodites.

This article was written by Alexander Wowra with great help in conceptualization and editing by Jacinta Hamley.