Story-A-Day #59: Worms

WORMS

There were thousands of worms. She had never seen so many worms in her life. They were squiggling and writhing everywhere, which in normal circumstances would have been alarming, but it was the dead of winter. There should not by any worms in the winter.

She walked gingerly along her driveway, carefully stepping over the piles of worms. What would cause something like this? A couple nights ago, she had noticed a different quality to the sunset, a spattering of colours like those in a bruise. It had been weird, but wouldn’t likely be the cause of this.

From the end of her driveway, she scanned the street. It was just as she had suspected: there were mounds of writhing worms lining the street in either direction. They weren’t your average dew worms either. A nearby telephone pole had a worm coiled around its base that must have been close to five feet long and three inched in diameter.

She shuddered involuntarily.

She made her way back up the driveway, cautiously sidestepping around the worms, and stepped back into her house. She turned on the television and flipped through the channels. It seemed like a newsworthy event, so maybe she could learn a little more about what exactly was going on.

Game shows, arrogant doctors “fixing” people, and some paid programming. There was nothing on the news channels.

She finally checked the Weather Network. When she was younger she remembered hearing stories about frogs and fish falling from the sky – apparently they would get sucked up by waterspouts and dropped miles away from where they began. There was a blizzard on the eastern seaboard, and thunder in the west. Nothing here in the middle though, and now that she thought about it, a waterspout couldn’t happen on a frozen lake.

She didn’t have a clue as to where the worms had come from, but she knew without a doubt that it would be a good year for ice fishing.

She pulled on her coat and boots, slid on her mittens and stepped back outside. Something needed to be done. She grabbed her snow shovel, the one shaped like a plow, and started clearing the driveway.