Worm

In the narrator's domestic world, the worm is a constant, unremarkable presence that she treats with casual, almost ritualistic violence. It appears in her catalog of small killings, a litany of everyday cruelties she performs around the house. She stamps on worms and grasshoppers, a chore of extermination that she lists alongside drowning spiders in the sink, electrocuting bees on the swing, and trapping flies in a jar of quince jelly. The worm is part of this inventory of small deaths, a creature so lowly that its destruction requires no special method, just a foot brought down on the earth. This casual stamping is not an act of rage but of routine maintenance, a way of asserting her dominion over the organic world that presses in on her from all sides.

The Worm in the Kitchen

The worm also appears in the context of domestic failure and accusation. When the husband confronts the narrator about her neglect of the house, he reveals what he found in the kitchen behind the gas cylinder: a dried-up rat and some worms. This discovery is a concrete piece of evidence in their ongoing war of recrimination, a sign of the rot and decay that has taken hold in their home while the narrator sits at the table with her trousers unbuttoned. The worms here are not just creatures to be stamped on; they are symptoms of a household falling apart, of a mother who is not taking care of things. The husband's finding of the worms is a rebuke, a physical manifestation of the narrator's failure to perform her domestic duties, and it stands in stark contrast to her own list of small killings, which she performs with a kind of detached, almost aesthetic pleasure.

The Worm in the Landscape of Rage

The worm is also present in the narrator's most violent, unhinged moments. Lying on the lawn, in a fit of frantic rage, she yanks out clumps of grass, over and over, and in her hand the green and yellow blades blend with worms and soil into what she calls a beautiful palette for a gruesome painting. Here the worm is not a separate creature to be destroyed but part of the very substance of her fury, mixed into the earth she tears up in a spastic, uncalming frenzy. The act of pulling up the grass with its worms is a physical expression of her internal state, a way of rending the world as she feels herself being rent. The worms are collateral damage in her rage, caught up in the clumps of earth she tears from the ground, their bodies becoming part of the palette of her despair.

The Worm in the Woods

The worm's most expansive appearance comes in the woods, where the narrator, having tied her baby to her body like a kangaroo and her joey, hops across the garden and tramples the mounds of earth left by subterranean intruders. She walks over a huge deposit of hundreds, thousands of worms and jumps on them, squishing them with her baby kangaroo. This is a scene of grotesque abundance, the worms appearing not as isolated pests but as a teeming mass underfoot, a living carpet of organic matter that she crushes with each hop. The act is almost playful, a game of squishing worms while carrying her child, but it is also a kind of baptism in the muck of the world, a deliberate immersion in the squalid, teeming life of the soil. The worms here are part of the jungle-like woods, a landscape of little rabbit skulls and dying chicks, a place where death and decay are the natural order, and the narrator, with her baby, is an active participant in that order.

The Worm as a Marker of the Organic

Across these appearances, the worm serves as a marker of the organic world's relentless, lowly presence. It is the creature that appears in the kitchen as a sign of decay, in the lawn as part of the soil's substance, and in the woods as a teeming mass to be squished. The narrator's relationship to the worm is consistent: it is something to be destroyed, stamped on, or mixed into the earth, never something to be spared or mourned. This casual violence toward the worm is part of the narrator's broader animality, her sense of herself as a beast who breathes slowly and heavily, leaving no air for anyone else. The worm is the lowest rung of the organic world, and the narrator's treatment of it reflects her own descent into a state where the distinction between human and animal, between mother and beast, has collapsed. The worm, in its ubiquity and its vulnerability, becomes a measure of the narrator's own unravelling, a creature so small and so abundant that its destruction is both meaningless and, in the narrator's hands, a kind of terrible ritual.