A worm is born in the soils of a graveyard. It spends its days digging through them, crawling between roots of flowers and long-separated bones of skeletons.


Something large and unfamiliar visits it a few times, bland except for the times when it dresses its body in blue. The worm doesn’t particularly care – it wiggles down after satiating its thirst on dew drops; let the giant entertain itself.


Its life comes to an end one day after the rains had come. Focused on drinking from grass stalks and indents in rocks, it doesn’t notice the machine of death until it’s upon it.


Squashed under a bike tyre, the worm dies as it lived – in the soils of its graveyard.


In the distance, a voice can be heard by all those who have ears, belonging to none other than Marie-Anne as she takes the flowers out of her bike basket.


“Damn, Annalise, be careful. I think you killed it. Look, its guts are spilling out.”


Annalise answers her, cheerful, “Maybe I should get another clock, smaller, just for this one.”


They laugh and the worm’s soul, hit by a terrible sense of déjà vu, hurries in its departure from the mortal realm. On the grass covering the grave it had dug under all its life falls a wreath of pink and blue flowers.


A crow startles a pigeon off the gravestone, and, ruffling its feathers, fixes its beady eyes on the soul as it ascends. It rises up and along the dome of the cloudless heavens, until it reaches the horizon, where it disappears into the folds of Death’s veil.


When Annalise goes to place a candle on the headstone, the crow flies off.


Marie-Anne jumps when a man whistles appreciatively from behind them, cloaked in black and brown and blue.


“You know, flying against the sky like that,” he says, “it looks almost like a birthmark.”


The woman steps back and hums.


“I suppose you’re right.”

 

Fin.