One Morning Sammy Woke…
By My Little Worm Cliff — Featuring: Bug Crush
One morning, Sammy woke up as a worm.
He had gone to bed the night before as much a man as any man, a definite homo sapien. By dawn’s early light, he was lumbricus terrestris: legless, eyeless and slippery.
To make matters worse, a spring rain had fallen and the ground was saturated. He wriggled from his burrow, obeying the vermicular instinct to escape to higher ground.
As he wriggled, he pondered. Whence this metamorphosis?
He’d been in a bar last night. A beautiful young woman had sat down near him and lit up a cigarette. He’d been rude to her. When she’d exhaled in his direction, perhaps trying to be flirtatious, he’d coughed and waved away the smoke and given her a dirty look. He’d said something ugly. He’d used words that normally wouldn’t leave his mouth unless alcohol had numbed his judgment. Now he was a worm and maybe she had had something to do with it. Women had powers that only stupid men mocked.
Sammy reached the edge of a vast, wide sidewalk. Part of him suddenly shivered with dread – this was no place for a worm! There was something still human about him – at least in his mind, a human knowledge. But was that blessing or curse?
He slithered onto the sidewalk. Almost immediately, a shoe, a pink sneaker, came crashing down inches away – but its wearer hadn’t seen him and kept on going. Then another – this time some boy. Then a heavy man’s shoe. Then a woman’s pump. Each time, they crashed down close by but missed him.
Now Sammy was nearly half-way across. He began to feel a sort of pride. Maybe they were scared of him. He stretched out to his full length – an exuberant six inches of worm hubris.
Someone else was coming. That someone came to a stop and looked down at him.
“What’s this? I almost stepped on you.”
Bereft of eyes, Sammy could not see Katelyn, of course. Nor could he hear, having no ears. But then he realized – perhaps as part of the enchantment – that he could see and hear her in a way, as if she was appearing on a tv screen in his earthworm mind.
And what he saw was an absolute gorgeous young woman with short dark hair; soft, full curves and long, long legs. She wore a short black skirt that showed off those svelte legs to perfection – and he could see pretty pink panties above them, that curved snugly around her trim and shapely bottom. And upon her feet — the most divine assemblage of painted toes, curvy ankles and arched soles that he had ever seen — she wore a brand new pair of Bakers.
He could smell the rich and slightly bitter aroma of the fresh leather as she stood beside him, could even smell the sweet scent of the soap with which she had recently bathed her feet, the body lotion that she had rubbed on them and the sharp smell of her fresh nail polish.
Any man would have given anything to pamper those pretty feet, to kiss and suckle those toes top to bottom and side to side, and to caress those soles and to trail his lips from the ball of her ankles to her smooth, painted nails – every delectable inch, whether she was fresh from her bath or her feet had been cooped up all day in hot boots.
Any man would gladly have laid down beneath her, eager to be her footstool, while she relaxed on the couch at the end of a long day; would have massaged those bare feet and laid them across his face to kiss the warm skin and to drink in its fragrance, to taste the salt of her perspiration and to lick it off like some kind of puppy dog.
But he was no man now, not even a dog, just a worm.
He relaxed. This girl looked like an angel, a sweet, delicate, kindly angel. No way would she step on him like some thoughtless schoolgirl, grinding him to goo just because he disgusted her with his pathetic existence.
“You shouldn’t be here. You could get stepped on,” she said solicitously.
Gently she nudged him with the edge of her sole. He recoiled, thrashing violently upon the pavement.
“Oh, poor thing,” she said. “I promise not to hurt you. You’re probably very scared. Maybe I should pick you up and put you back into the grass where you’ll be safe.”
“If you stay here, the sun will surely burn you,” she continued.
She raised her foot over him, a shapely shadow indeed, blocking out the baneful light. Then she began to lower her foot. Smooth, hard leather began to press against his soft body. At first, it was pleasant, the softest of touches. Then it grew harder, no longer an embrace but a crush.
What the heck was she doing? He began to struggle but the pressure only increased. He had no arms to push back against her with. He was weak and small; she was all power, all size. His life was hers to take.
She shivered – and he had been a man long enough to recognize that kind of a shiver in a woman. She was feeling pleasure, she was peaking, and his fright and his weak struggle was intensifying it, like one of those energy eating aliens from the science fiction movies.
The rough pavement beneath him began to bite into his worm-skin and her sole against his topside now began to deform his cylindrical body.
Then, suddenly, the pressure vanished and the blinding sun returned. She had only been teasing him! She wasn’t going to step on him after all. He listened to the clicking of her heels as she walked away. He stretched out, his tiny brain reeling in relief.
Suddenly, he heard a sharp scrape. She had turned on her heel and was walking back his way, striding crisply like a catwalk model. Before he could tense, before he could draw in his vulnerable length, the front of her sole slammed down upon his midsection.
Agony shot through his body as his innards were mashed into goo. His head and tail sections jerked spasmodically against the edge of her shoe, to no avail. She bore down and twisted her foot, twisted like he was a cigarette that she intended to put out. His body juices soaked into her sole, staining them forever.
“I don’t have to keep promises to worms,” she said, laughing. “I stepped on my first worm when I was two and I’ve crushed every worm that I’ve seen ever since, hundreds of them. Crushed about six worms one wet day in second grade, on my way to Picture Day, in my prettiest little shoes.
“I made games out of it — I used to drop them into my hopscotch squares and see how long it was before my friends or I landed on them with a good, hard jump. We used to love to jump rope over them, too – we’d get the boys to toss ’em onto the pavement for us or do it ourselves with a stick, and then jump, jump, jump, whoops, squish! Girls can be SO mean.
“You should have seen the sidewalks in our neighborhood after a rainy day. My girlfriends and I would pretend to be ballet dancers and we’d twirl en pointe or pirouette all up and down the sidewalk until we’d found and stepped on every last worm. The girl who squished the most “won” the dance competition, you see. God, our shoes would be a mess when we were done – but it was absolutely exhilarating! We looked so cute, like little angels out there, until you realized what we were doing.
“I squished them all the way through high school, too, every time the rain brought the stupid little things out.
“I even stomped one right in front of my date last Friday, on our way to the stadium for some dumb game he was taking me to. I ground it to paste and then wiped the goo on his hands, just for fun. He was horrified at first but he came around.”
And now Katelyn cruelly kicked poor Sammy’s ruined body, head and tail still intact, midsection flattened and marred forever with the mark of her shoe leather, into the grass.
“I’d crush you the rest of the way, but … I just don’t care,” she said. “Oh, but you might dry up too quickly, lying there on the grass like that.”
She leaned over and pursed her lips. A ball of white froth suddenly appeared in the little “o” that she made. And she let the great gob of girl spit drop hot onto his writhing head, engulfing his senses entirely in her moisture, teeming with her enzymes and germs, forcing him to drink it in through his worm-pores.
Epilogue:
Scene: An emergency room near the university:
“Doctor, what the hell happened to this guy?”
“They found him in the grass near Baxter U. They think he got run over by a car. His whole midsection is crushed – spleen ruptured, kidney pulverized, intestines torn up. If he lives, he’ll have one hell of a scar and I doubt he’ll walk again.
“Funny thing, though. That tread across his gut doesn’t look like a car tire. If I didn’t know better, if it wasn’t impossible, I’d say he got stomped on. It’s a perfect hourglass, like a woman’s sole. I know, ridiculous.
“And what the blazes is that gooey stuff all over him? Smells like bubble gum and the last time my wife kissed me.”
