{"id":6316,"date":"2013-06-03T04:30:24","date_gmt":"2013-06-03T11:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/?p=6316"},"modified":"2014-02-14T08:55:25","modified_gmt":"2014-02-14T16:55:25","slug":"the-worms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/03\/the-worms\/","title":{"rendered":"The Worms"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

“Esther discovers a worm on an old, hated quilt … and then the world.”<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\nThe Worms first entered into what you and I would think of as reality through a quasar catalogued as 3C 279. Quasar 3C 279 does not exist for this purpose nor had it been used so prior; it was just handy at the time.
\nA mere handful of pinkish-gray, banded, larval forms, no more than two centimeters in length, The Worms are more appropriately referred to in the singular for, despite the apparent lack of connection between bodies, \u201cthey\u201d are \u201cit\u201d far more than \u201cit\u201d is \u201cthey\u201d.<\/p>\n

There was no one around to catalogue the quasar as 3C 279 when The Worms first arrived but, by the time we humans had collected its photometric data, The Worms was already here on Earth, embedded in a quilt.<\/p>\n

One is tempted to imagine The Worms flying through space to reach us, as that is what we have been taught to think things do in vacuum, fly or, more accurately, fall but The Worms did not fly, nor fall, nor crawl; it wriggled. Yes, wriggled.
\nNo one, not even The Worms, could determine whether there was purpose behind this wriggling journey but wriggle it did and, though there was no apparent hurry, the arrival from such a remote point in space to the unassuming blue of our planet took far less time than it would have were The Worms made of light.<\/p>\n

What attracted it to our twinkling orb, if attracted it was, remains a mystery but, slowing at the K\u00e1rm\u00e1n line of our home’s protective shell, The Worms tasted the exosphere and, choosing a spot, perhaps at random, settled to the surface directly below it in no great hurry.
\nDown through the layers it came, wriggling along casually through the auras of the thermosphere and the traditionally deadly mesosphere, where it witnessed without much interest the fiery destruction of far more hasty particles. Sinking unaffected through the eddying currents and blustery bullying of the stratos and tropospheres, it paused and noted the increasing pressure and the varying mixes of the surrounding gaseous components: argon, krypton, xenon, iodine, ammonia, oxygen, nitrogen, and so on.
\nPenetrating a nimbostratus cloud, it realized the sudden delight of coalescing precipitation and followed the resulting shower down, dancing with it until the moisture disappeared as virga; turning to vapor at the heat of the approaching land.
\nThe uppermost boughs of a maple-leaved oak tree tickled it as it drifted down, savoring the cool green, gnarled brown, and living wet of the aged yet, in comparison to The Worms, vastly more youthful Quercus acerifolia.
\nAs it emerged from the canopy of leaves, The Worms was startled by a sudden interface with a shake-shingled roof and paused there a moment, half in and half out, contemplating. A wide eyed robin watched The Worms from her nest, similarly entranced.<\/p>\n

Perhaps jarred back into action by the slamming of the screen door below, The Worms made the sudden decision to continue its descent through the roof and encountered a hot, dark, and dusty attic.
\nYou might think that an awareness such as The Worms\u2019, startled into curiosity by something as mundane as a shake shingled roof, might be bowled over by the further revelation of an attic. Instead, as you and I might do, it took only a casual glance in passing and continued on down through the ceiling, unimpressed.
\nA mouse, caught in the act of nibbling something that might or might not be tasty, paused in her gustatory investigations to watch the wriggling forms pass, her little, furry head twitching in curiosity and cautious fear. When The Worms passed, leaving not the slightest hint in the heavy dust of the dark and raftered surface of ever having existed, she returned to her nibbling, unconcerned.<\/p>\n

Popping out into the home proper at the top of a seldom used hall closet, The Worms encountered the aforementioned quilt and stopped.
\nHad The Worms been a cat it would have been easy to understand why it stopped for, as a cat, you would have seen The Worms nose down, mouth open, eyes gone to slits, and head bobbing as it scented, scanned, and mentally ingested this new discovery but it was The Worms and not a cat. Its squirming, investigative ecstasy deep within the wadded cotton batting was difficult to interpret, much less see, even had anyone been there to notice.<\/p>\n

There wasn\u2019t anything all that special about the quilt. It was a simple, old, hand-me-down; big enough for a double bed, not worn but certainly lumpy. The underside was an off white or cream – it was hard to say – while the top was decorated with a five patch block pattern of faded green and orange. It was for this that it was stuffed into the top of a closet and all but forgotten instead of spread over someone\u2019s bed, for Esther found it ugly.
\nEsther is Esther Weems and it was she who laid claim to the quilt or, given the vagaries of heirlooms, perhaps it was the other way around. She received the quilt the day her surname changed from Krahl to Weems and, much like her life, the quilt went from cheerfully packaged box to stuffy upstairs closet in under 6 hours time.
\nShe\u2019d known the quilt since childhood, having seen it on her parent\u2019s bed from the day she was able to focus her eyes. For almost as long, she\u2019d been told the story of its birth at the hands of her grandmother\u2019s quilting circle and that it was destined to be gifted to hers the day she wedded. Further, she\u2019d known just as long that she would pop the ugly thing out of sight the minute she had the opportunity.
\nAnd so she did, and it wasn\u2019t but a few years later that The Worms encountered it and found it far more entrancing than she ever had. So entrancing, in fact, that The Worms remained within it for nearly forty years, engrossed; wondering at its design, sampling flakes of sloughed off skin, witnessing its continued and inevitable stale decay.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in the house below, Esther Weems, n\u00e9e Krahl, also decayed.
\nOnce a bright-eyed girl with dreams of the world and the impending gaiety of family life, the passing years of none of this reduced her to a drab, bent woman whose lips moved when she scrubbed but whom otherwise kept mum.
\nTo her neighbors and church peers, she was \u201cqueer old Esther,\u201d or \u201cquiet old Esther,\u201d or \u201cpoor, dull thing.\u201d Some of the neighbor children, when the neighbors had children, had thought of her as \u201cmean old Esther,\u201d simply because she never smiled, at least not at them, not even on holidays at church. She only spoke at them if there was something to scold after, such as crossing through her yard instead of using the road or snitching strawberries and tomatoes out of her garden. Even then, they knew she wasn’t really interesting enough to be \u201cmean,\u201d nor old enough to be \u201cold,\u201d at least not back in those days and now that they’d grown up and moved on, they didn’t think of her at all.
\nThe transformation from young girl to side-glanced crone was a startlingly quick one, seeming to happen in the span of a decade after her marriage to Elmer Weems.
\nEsther and her husband, Elmer, were brought together by sheer lack of alternative, their few peers from the sparsely populated county having shown the initiative necessary to escape the dusty fate that settled on those, like Elmer and Esther, who proved less apt.
\nEsther\u2019s dreams had meant to lead her to such imagined ends, but proved incapable of taking her body along thus, when outside pressure became too much to bear, she knuckled under and married Elmer Weems.<\/p>\n

Elmer was not a bad man. He was not violent, quick to anger, nor was he given to excessive drink, or prurient carousing. His failings were lack of imagination, excessive religious shame, and a faith in tradition that manifested as inertia.
\nEsther had known Elmer since her early school days. First as the boy most likely to make un-Christian noises during a test or lecture, then, as he grew into country manhood, as a mild carouser at church dances, offensive guard of the high-school football team, and the not uncomely, crew-cut young man who eschewed graduation by 14 months to help his ailing father run the family farm, the very farm she now shared with him – but how had it happened?<\/p>\n

To be sure, they were aware of each other early on but only as much as they were aware of others. In a community as small as Brookston, there weren\u2019t enough people, much less children, to be strangers with anyone, only yourself. Of attraction between them, there seemed little.
\nThe notion to marry Elmer had come as a surprise to Esther in the form of a duty from her mother, who began hammering in the idea with pointed regularity after Esther graduated from high-school.
\n\u201cThere aint no shame bein’ a housewife and you need just get them dreams outcher head. That Elmer\u2019s a hard workin man and he aint too bad to look at,\u201d she would say. \u201cYou\u2019re lucky he even considers a fool girl like you, given all he could have. You getcherself some children and everthin\u2019 \u2018ll be raht with the world.\u201d
\nWith this thought in mind and her father’s work-calloused hand in hers, Esther walked down the aisle and into the nothingness that life with Elmer promised.
\nThe inability of the couple to produce any progeny, or even much joy in trying, further increased the glum nature of their union and both sank into a dull routine of an ever decreasing capacity to dream of a future any more relevant than that which they’d already lived.<\/p>\n

The day Esther pulled the forgotten, family quilt down off its high shelf was a day like any other but, having opened the closet in search of some old cloth with which to make into rags for polishing, her eyes caught the dim memory of childhood in the faded hues of this long-disliked bed cloth and so she was drawn to it. Even hated objects can carry a seed of sweet reminiscence and so it was with the sudden sight of the quilt.
\nStretched by the effort, she worked the dead weight of the folded, heavy fabric back and forth towards her off the shelf. Unprepared for its mass, the quilt spilled from her hands, uncoiling down the front of her to the bare, dusty boards of the upper hall floor.
\n\u201cOh, bother,\u201d she said.
\nGroaning a bit, she lowered herself to a kneel and began to collect the dense cloth to her, recalling the times when, as a child, her mother had folded this very quilt, fresh from the clothesline, into her lap while recounting the family story of her grandmother\u2019s quilting circle.
\nShe stared at the quilt\u2019s design and shook her head: green and orange with little, three-string tassels of soft, pink fabric dangling limp and pointless from the center of each square. The joke was that the maker had to have been color blind but her mother always said that the uniqueness of the design was part of the point: \u201cWe\u2019re all differ\u2019nt inside, Esty, an\u2019 not always pretty – but we recognize our own and love \u2018em all the same because of who they are, ever\u2019 last thread,\u201d and with the memory came the feeling of her mother\u2019s lips pressing tight against the hair on the crown of her head
\nWorking the lumpy mass of folds back into a kempt square with her gnarled and spotted hands, Esther wondered at the lack of contrast between the quilt and her life and the thread of continuity that seemed to run between the two. The fabric in her hands was ugly and coarse, rough to the touch and stale, just like her life. It was but a collection of unremarkable, cast-off squares basted together out of necessity from another\u2019s questionable vision to create a thing so utilitarian and distasteful that it ended up ignored and forgotten. She had never understood the romantic tradition that her mother had attached to it, just as her own romantic future with Elmer had proven a forced illusion; a burden to be borne.<\/p>\n

Esther sat staring through the quilt down the narrow alley of her soul until her eyes came back into focus and saw, there in the middle of one of the quilt\u2019s green and orange squares, a small, grayish pink worm. At first she thought it a remnant of a torn tassel but then it wriggled.
\nNow where did that come from?
\nEsther plucked the worm off the quilt and brought it closer to her eyes. The tiny thing thrashed, helpless, as any worm would do. It looked vaguely like the silkworms Esther remembered seeing hanging from the trees during childhood trips to her now dead Uncle Rich\u2019s farm. It also reminded her of the maggots she had seen swarming the openings of the of unfortunate animals found along the road.
\nWrinkling her nose and feeling an unlooked for burst of long-held anger, Esther increased the pressure of her fingertips, crushing the struggling form to a chunky smear.
\nThe Worms found this action more interesting than the quilt they had been studying and so they entered her.<\/p>\n

Elmer later told friends and family that it must have been a stroke.
\nWhen he came home that day, he knew something was wrong from the minute he turned into the driveway. Most of the contents of the back porch area were out in the lawn, laid out in an almost discernible pattern, or so it looked but, no matter how he stared, no matter how the potential meaning or order danced, there, tantalizing in its possibility, it was no pattern that Elmer could fathom.
\nThe house was in similar shape. Drawers were out, doors ajar, boxes opened and emptied. Furniture was upended, moved to different rooms, and stacked in curious arrays. Every surface in the house \u2013 counters, floors, tables – had some odd collection of everyday objects made inexplicably remarkable by the grouping: food, clothing, tools, photographs all cheek by jowl with each other; inscrutable but somehow compelling. Elmer stood in the parlor, scratching his head in fearful amazement. Then Esther appeared.
\nGrinning, shoulders no longer stooped but thrown back, Esther\u2019s eyes glimmered with life. Her hair was loose from its usual bun and sprayed out from her head like the sun\u2019s corona drawn in a child\u2019s hand. Her clothing was equally haphazard and askew.
\n\u201cYou musht be Helmer,\u201d she croaked, advancing with a purposeful stride.
\n\u201cEsther, what\u2019s got india, girl?\u201d
\nHe tried to pull back from her but hesitated in his shock and she caught his head. He grabbed her wrists and tried to pull her hands from the sides of his face but was surprised by the uncharacteristic strength of will he encountered there.
\nEsther pulled his face to hers and gave him the sloppiest, most passionate kiss he had ever received. He spluttered and fell away from her when he felt her tongue probing his mouth.
\n\u201cEsther!\u201d Legs scissoring, pulling himself along the floor, Elmer made for the door, his eyes wide on his wife who stood, disheveled, a look of amused confusion on her face.<\/p>\n

The Blum home was only a short distance away, across an ever fallow field, which Elmer crossed with an uncharacteristic haste, running more than a few steps for the first time in more than twenty years. He arrived on the Blum\u2019s porch red-faced and puffing, his blue work shirt untucked and calicoed with flowering blossoms of sweat.
\n\u201cEsther\u2019s plum loss her mine,\u201d he wheezed, mopping his face and sun freckled pate with a yellowed handkerchief, \u201cgone roun the ben!\u201d
\nFrancine Blum offered him condolences, assurances, and a glass of sun tea with a lemon wedge while Hubert Blum phoned the ambulance.<\/p>\n

Having calmed Elmer, the Blum\u2019s convinced him that Esther likely needed their help until the ambulance arrived, so the three of them crept back across the field, towards the Weems\u2019, hopes held in check.
\nThey found Esther in the kitchen, putting things back where they belonged, for the most part, and singing a sprightly song in an awkward voice. Seeing her neighbors and husband she blushed.
\n\u201cSho shorry,\u201d she slurred, then gestured at the remaining disarray around her with open palms as if to say \u201cwhat can a body do?\u201d<\/p>\n

First there was the ambulance ride, which, in retrospect, seemed unnecessary, then there were the tests, which proved inconclusive. After weeks of long drives to the city, the doctors could find nothing wrong with Esther, explaining it as an \u201cepisode\u201d of some sort, which Elmer took to mean they couldn\u2019t figure out a way to squeeze another dime out of either him or his insurance company and so he took her hand and drove her home.
\nHe didn\u2019t complain too loudly, though for, in the interim, Esther had improved. She remained a bit foggy, continued to be enthusiastically curious about the most mundane of everyday objects, and still smiled at the drop of a hat but her speech improved and she could carry out most of her chores with relative facility. Best of all, she never again tried to get fresh with him; they were seniors, after all! Before Elmer realized it, he was back to ignoring her most of the time.<\/p>\n

Francine Blum never forgot the experience, however and, afterwards, there was something quite different about her once quiet, predictable neighbor and she pursed her lips almost daily over her tea about it.
\nDespite having known each other for over three decades, Francine and Esther had never been close, though Francine was always ready to pretend quite the opposite in the years prior to what she now termed \u201cthat day.\u201d
\nCertainly they had loaned each other helping hands, swapped recipes, home remedies, shared rides to church socials and the like from time to time but it was all surface. Never had they shared a single, true moment of female bonding or understanding. Francine made it her mission to get that out of certain people and nearly always succeeded but, after 30 years, all she\u2019d ever managed to do with Esther was convince herself that the woman was just a cold, odd duck.
\nNow, of all things, she had started waving at Francine from across the way. The first time Esther did it, she was standing in the middle of her yard across the field and waving with big, wide sweeps of her entire arm. The vision so startled Francine that she nearly dropped the chicken she was carrying straight into the slobbering mouth of the dog that circled at her looking for just such an opportunity. Now the woman was always waving and it made Francine wince.
\nAnd that wasn\u2019t all.
\nEsther had taken to coming into the Blum\u2019s yard unbidden with jars of preserves, strange, childlike questions, almost drunken behavior at times. Worse, she left Francine with the creeping sense that she was trying to bore into her with those queer, bright eyes of hers. Eyes she didn\u2019t remember Esther having had like that before. Eyes that tried to get right in you and at your very person.
\nAs a consequence, Francine Blum had taken to slinking about her own property.
\nWhen traversing the lawn between the house and the feed pens, she would shrug her head below the line of the hedge. Seeing Esther in the yard across the field, she\u2019d stand behind a tree and count to fifty before daring another peep to see if the coast was clear. In the house, she avoided those windows whose curtains did not offer proper concealment. On more occasions than she cared to count, when Esther had come calling, Francine had lain on the floor of her kitchen, pretending she wasn\u2019t home. It was embarrassing, unseemly, unsanitary and Francine resented her for it.
\n\u201cThat woman is wrong in the head, Hubey,\u201d she would say to her husband over dinner, using the pet-name he\u2019d long since quit telling her he hated.
\n\u201cOh, leave them poor folks alone, Fran,\u201d he\u2019d reply. \u201cNeither she nor Elmer\u2019s never been right in the head but they aint hurt nobody and they aint likely to start now. Why, both of \u2018em\u2019s ready for the grave more\u2019n anything else, you mark my words.\u201d
\nThe women at church were more receptive to Francine\u2019s paranoias and gave an even wider berth to the woman whom had never been invited to be part of their circle in the first place. Now, instead of tentatively placing her to the periphery of whatever function they had planned, they snubbed her outright – but if Esther noticed their special lack of attention, it didn\u2019t show. If anything, she seemed happier than usual, infuriating the women to no end.<\/p>\n

For her part, Esther came slowly to her new life with the dawning happiness of a small child waking to a glorious Christmas morning.
\nInitially, she had no real idea of what was going on, couldn\u2019t sense in any concrete way that she\u2019d been taken over from the inside. The very notion that she was in the possession of an outside entity, what amounted to a handful of space worms, was so far outside her ken that it would have made no sense to her even if it had been explained. Instead, she simply went along for the ride, feeling like a passenger in her own body, a passenger wrapped in a thick, soft gauze who knew the town better than the driver but had never fully learned how to operate the vehicle.
\nMuch like Elmer, she wondered if she\u2019d not had a stroke of some kind, or was suffering from one of those multiple-personality, crazy spells she\u2019d read about in a magazine once. Her own grandmother, she of the hated quilt, had gone a bit off, as they say, in her old age and eventually had to be put away in a home, so there was that to consider.
\nWatching from her surreal vantage point, however, Esther could quite clearly see that, if a bit clunky at first, whomever or whatever was in control of her body was not veering further off track with each passing day but, rather, slowly becoming more competent at being … well, at being her.
\nThere was no question in her mind that it could be God as she was quite certain God would have spoken to her to reassure her or through her to spread his word to others instead of silently reveling in the simplest minutia of the everyday. Further, she was sure the God she had spent her entire life dutifully studying would never have taken the time to explore and enjoy the kinds of personal things – dirty things, her mother would have said – that she had long since given up but which the new tenants seemed eager to experience when the situation permitted it. She had to admit that she was, too.<\/p>\n

If The Worms was surprised by this new way of experiencing the world – and it was – so, too, was Esther. The emotions that The Worms tapped into with its continual joy of discovery was fed in part to her, whether of a purpose or incidental, and even when she was laughing at its mistakes, she was enjoying its sense of wonder. Never before had she so clearly reveled in the intricate delicacy of a flower\u2019s blossom, the rich, earthy smell of the world after a good rain, the way Elmer\u2019s face relaxed away from his worry lines into that of his much younger self when he slept. Oh, she\u2019d known of these things before, of course, but had not experienced them to the depth that she now did as if through new eyes. Colors burst and crackled, sound was tangible, pleasure swelled. Even soap suds popping on her wrists as she did the evening\u2019s dishes was a sensation to behold in quiet and respectful contemplation. How perfect and tiny the bubbles all were. How bright. How fragile.
\nHelpless but not frightened, she sat back and let it, whatever it was, rummage through her days, her memories, and her range of emotions, ignoring those it found distasteful and returning again and again to those it enjoyed.<\/p>\n

As the months passed, however, the newness began to wear off for both parties and Esther felt frustration at her inability to tell whatever was in charge of her body to take it off the farm, back to the city and on, farther, out of the state, out of the country, over the oceans, out into the world. She wanted to give whoever was in charge the world and then, through them, receive back the gift made better by their filter of wonder but the conversation ever seemed only one way and she was left helpless at The Worms\u2019 diminishing interest.<\/p>\n

The morning she woke to find The Worms gone, the desolation she felt was more complete than the joy of the possession had ever been. Another person might have taken on the role of The Worms and gone forward as Esther had so longed them to do during their tenure but she could not see that she was the vessel, not The Worms, and so she lay there in hopes that they might return. She lay there all through that first day, eyes shut, barely breathing, and would have continued had Elmer not bullied her to standing, to getting dressed, to going through the numb ritual or preparing his victuals. And so it was that she stopped. Stopped speaking. Stopped eating. Stopped cleaning. Stopped caring for herself. Elmer finally gave in and drove Esther back to the city.
\n\u201cI told you so, Hubey,\u201d Francine said, blowing into her tea. <\/p>\n

Despite a diagnosis of depression, Elmer remained convinced that Esther had suffered another stroke and, unable to cope, had her put in a home. Unable to take care of it himself and cajoled by relatives, Elmer sold the farm and moved into the spare bedroom at his brother\u2019s modest home in Columbus, Ohio.
\nWithin the year both he and Esther were consigned to the earth.<\/p>\n

That winter, a decrepit apple tree in a remote, Polish field, blossomed to produce a beautiful crop of apples that, had anyone seen it, made its snow-covered branches look like an impromptu Christmas decoration.
\nThe winter after that, it hung as bare and skeletal as any other deciduous tree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Esther discovers a worm on an old, hated quilt … and then the world.”   The Worms first entered into what you and I would think of as reality through a quasar catalogued as 3C 279. Quasar 3C 279 does not exist for this purpose nor had it been used so prior; it was just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107,51],"tags":[710,711],"class_list":["post-6316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best","category-fiction","tag-science-fiction","tag-worms-from-space"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Worms<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/03\/the-worms\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Worms\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"“Esther discovers a worm on an old, hated quilt … and then the world.”   The Worms first entered into what you and I would think of as reality through a quasar catalogued as 3C 279. Quasar 3C 279 does not exist for this purpose nor had it been used so prior; it was just […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/03\/the-worms\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"coreyshead\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:author\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/coreyaedwards\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2013-06-03T11:30:24+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2014-02-14T16:55:25+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Corey A. Edwards\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Corey A. Edwards\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"22 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/coreyshead.com\\\/blog\\\/2013\\\/06\\\/03\\\/the-worms\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/coreyshead.com\\\/blog\\\/2013\\\/06\\\/03\\\/the-worms\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Corey A. Edwards\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/coreyshead.com\\\/blog\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/1db586e2b6698eb23d62b4e881ee2479\"},\"headline\":\"The Worms\",\"datePublished\":\"2013-06-03T11:30:24+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2014-02-14T16:55:25+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/coreyshead.com\\\/blog\\\/2013\\\/06\\\/03\\\/the-worms\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":4504,\"commentCount\":0,\"keywords\":[\"science-fiction\",\"worms from space\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Best\",\"Fiction\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/coreyshead.com\\\/blog\\\/2013\\\/06\\\/03\\\/the-worms\\\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/coreyshead.com\\\/blog\\\/2013\\\/06\\\/03\\\/the-worms\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/coreyshead.com\\\/blog\\\/2013\\\/06\\\/03\\\/the-worms\\\/\",\"name\":\"The Worms\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/coreyshead.com\\\/blog\\\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2013-06-03T11:30:24+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2014-02-14T16:55:25+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/coreyshead.com\\\/blog\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/1db586e2b6698eb23d62b4e881ee2479\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/coreyshead.com\\\/blog\\\/2013\\\/06\\\/03\\\/the-worms\\\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/coreyshead.com\\\/blog\\\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/coreyshead.com\\\/blog\\\/\",\"name\":\"coreyshead\",\"description\":\"Just another fist-full of lips on the weekend.\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\\\/\\\/coreyshead.com\\\/blog\\\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/coreyshead.com\\\/blog\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/1db586e2b6698eb23d62b4e881ee2479\",\"name\":\"Corey A. Edwards\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/99aab955427dc38942c6aec34ce90e34633a92a4d52ecca088caa198d5146222?s=96&d=blank&r=pg\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/99aab955427dc38942c6aec34ce90e34633a92a4d52ecca088caa198d5146222?s=96&d=blank&r=pg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/secure.gravatar.com\\\/avatar\\\/99aab955427dc38942c6aec34ce90e34633a92a4d52ecca088caa198d5146222?s=96&d=blank&r=pg\",\"caption\":\"Corey A. Edwards\"},\"sameAs\":[\"http:\\\/\\\/coreyshead.com\",\"https:\\\/\\\/www.facebook.com\\\/coreyaedwards\"],\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/coreyshead.com\\\/blog\\\/author\\\/cae\\\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The Worms","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/03\/the-worms\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"The Worms","og_description":"“Esther discovers a worm on an old, hated quilt … and then the world.”   The Worms first entered into what you and I would think of as reality through a quasar catalogued as 3C 279. Quasar 3C 279 does not exist for this purpose nor had it been used so prior; it was just […]","og_url":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/03\/the-worms\/","og_site_name":"coreyshead","article_author":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/coreyaedwards","article_published_time":"2013-06-03T11:30:24+00:00","article_modified_time":"2014-02-14T16:55:25+00:00","author":"Corey A. Edwards","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Corey A. Edwards","Est. reading time":"22 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/03\/the-worms\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/03\/the-worms\/"},"author":{"name":"Corey A. Edwards","@id":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/1db586e2b6698eb23d62b4e881ee2479"},"headline":"The Worms","datePublished":"2013-06-03T11:30:24+00:00","dateModified":"2014-02-14T16:55:25+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/03\/the-worms\/"},"wordCount":4504,"commentCount":0,"keywords":["science-fiction","worms from space"],"articleSection":["Best","Fiction"],"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/03\/the-worms\/#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/03\/the-worms\/","url":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/03\/the-worms\/","name":"The Worms","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/#website"},"datePublished":"2013-06-03T11:30:24+00:00","dateModified":"2014-02-14T16:55:25+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/1db586e2b6698eb23d62b4e881ee2479"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/2013\/06\/03\/the-worms\/"]}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/","name":"coreyshead","description":"Just another fist-full of lips on the weekend.","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/1db586e2b6698eb23d62b4e881ee2479","name":"Corey A. Edwards","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/99aab955427dc38942c6aec34ce90e34633a92a4d52ecca088caa198d5146222?s=96&d=blank&r=pg","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/99aab955427dc38942c6aec34ce90e34633a92a4d52ecca088caa198d5146222?s=96&d=blank&r=pg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/99aab955427dc38942c6aec34ce90e34633a92a4d52ecca088caa198d5146222?s=96&d=blank&r=pg","caption":"Corey A. Edwards"},"sameAs":["http:\/\/coreyshead.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/coreyaedwards"],"url":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/author\/cae\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6316"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7765,"href":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6316\/revisions\/7765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coreyshead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}