Chapter 1

Writhing about in the misty petrochore, the earthworm gave a full body wave. Its blue grey veins were dripping with mud and soot and they squirmed on its back just as its whole body squirmed on the concrete. Calvin’s bleeding, 18-year-old face was inches from the creature, laying against the wet, abrasive sidewalk. His tears had subsided as he watched his new friend dance for him. The worm had what looked like a funeral band around its neck. It was mourning Calvin’s dignity, his last shred of self respect, which had been stolen by the Queen and her servants. He had dared to speak well of one of the other boys, Stanley, of whom he hadn’t even been very fond. Stanley had been exiled for playing soldiers and thieves in the yard after class. The act had been labeled a hormonal stain on his reputation, so he had been forced outside the walls. Calvin had only mentioned how, while the exiled boy had been rude on many occasions, he had the coolest, wittiest sense of humor and he had defended girls from yard brawling on more than one occasion. Calvin had been quickly punished for his misspeech. He had been discussing it with a friend in the courtyard when one of the Queen’s servants, a 4 foot tall, blue scaled, slug-like creature, opened up one of its giant gills and spat out a bright green tentacle right at Calvin’s jugular vein and around his neck. The slug’s usual fatigue was gone. It dragged him with rabid fervor across the park and into the courtyard to administer his punishment. Calvin’s shirt and corduroy pants tore with every grind against the ground. When they reached the stage he saw just how many hundreds of other children were to witness his humiliation. Without a thought, he scanned them for the big brown eyes he gazed into every morning in science class. There they were, buried in a crowd of faces. It was Charlotte. The girl who had possessed his dreams ever since he met her two summers ago. She looked in shock and in pain at the sight of him being subject to punishment. And then the slug began the Hugging. The flesh beneath the servant’s scales morphed into a thick slime. This slime warped and expanded toward and around Calvin until it wholly enveloped him. Calvin’s body was swept up and then hovered there, suspended within the mass of blue slug flesh, his scream plastered to his face as if he were some ancient, perversely designed doll. His clothing dissolved into nothing. The top layer of his skin started to melt. The pain was a glaze over his entire body, engulfing him in a hell so universal that it was impossible for him to focus on one part of his body. He was nothing. He was fire itself. And then the slime vomited him back onto the stage. Calvin convulsed, naked, every inch of his skin raw, every pore oozing with blood. And then he heard the laughs. His classmates laughed at him - a hollow, obligatory laugh that held no humor, only bitterness. They knew they would receive the same Hugging if they had refused to laugh. Charlotte took longer to laugh, but eventually she did. Calvin lay there unable to see much, only the concrete of that stage and the dancing worm. Eventually the sounds of laughter subsided and turned into footsteps, until even the footsteps subsided. And then there were only the sounds of nature.