It’s strange how quickly the familiar can turn alien. A yard you’ve crossed a thousand times without thinking suddenly feels hostile, as if something ancient and indifferent has surfaced just to remind you how fragile your sense of normal is. Those glistening, tangled bodies weren’t monsters, just earthworms suffocating after the rain, clinging together in a desperate knot for survival. Yet knowing the explanation didn’t make it easier to look at. It only made it worse—because it was real.
Since that day, I don’t step outside absentmindedly anymore. I scan the ground, not just for writhing heaps, but for anything I’ve trained myself to ignore. That living knot under my window forced me to see how much life is pulsing just beneath the surface, silent and unseen, until one morning it decides to rise and breathe where you can’t look away.
