Angleworms

Angleworms enter this episode first as vulnerable creatures and then as the subjects of Sophia’s unfinished book, A Study of Angleworms That Have Come Apart. After she accidentally cuts an angleworm in two while digging, Sophia turns her alarm into an inquiry: she and Grandmother imagine what the creature might feel, how each half might behave, and what human fishing does to it. The worms are never granted a settled account of their inner lives; their significance lies in the care with which Sophia insists that their experience cannot simply be dismissed.

Encounter and First Response

One morning Sophia and Grandmother find a strange bulb washed ashore and decide to plant it outside the guest room. As Sophia puts her spade into the ground to make a hole, she cuts an angleworm in two. Seeing both halves writhing on the black earth, she drops the spade, backs against the house, and screams. The accident is concrete and sudden: a practical task has exposed a small creature’s injured body, and Sophia cannot continue as if nothing has happened.

The reaction is part of a wider change in Sophia. That summer she has become afraid of small animals, creatures that once filled her days as pets before she eventually set them free. She now watches the ground anxiously, wary of things that creep and crawl. Grandmother has tried to discuss this new terror without success. The cut angleworm brings the fear into immediate focus: Sophia is not merely imagining that small creatures might be vulnerable; she sees two halves moving in the earth.

Grandmother answers by assuring her, “They’ll grow out again,” and repeats that reassurance while planting the bulb. Sophia calms, but remains pale and sits silently on the veranda steps with her arms around her knees. The assurance comforts her without making the sight disappear. The episode leaves a productive tension between what Grandmother tells her and what Sophia has just witnessed, a tension that turns into the subject of their book.

The Book Sophia Begins

Grandmother suggests that someone sufficiently interested ought to write a book about angleworms. Sophia takes the proposal seriously. She asks how to spell a word, becomes frustrated by the interruption to her thinking, and throws down a book made of blank pages sewn together at the spine. Its title is A Study of Angleworms That Have Come Apart. What began as distress over an injured animal has become an effort to describe it, though Sophia immediately doubts that she can finish.

Grandmother offers to write while Sophia dictates. The first page already has an illustration of an angleworm in two parts. The guest room is cool and quiet, the setting sun provides light, and Sophia’s Papa is working at his desk on the other side of the wall. Sophia says she likes knowing he is there while he works, then asks Grandmother to read her opening sentence: “Some people fish with worms.” The scene places her imaginative inquiry in ordinary domestic surroundings, with Grandmother serving as scribe rather than replacing Sophia as the source of the ideas.

Two Halves, Two Possible Lives

Sophia’s account imagines different responses to the danger of a fishing hook. A frightened worm contracts to one-seventh of its length, becoming short and fat and therefore easy to put on a hook. A clever worm instead stretches as long as possible, leaving nothing for the hook to catch, and comes apart. These are hypotheses within Sophia’s dictated book, not established findings: she explicitly says science does not know whether the worm breaks through overstretching or does something intelligent.

Her uncertainty does not stop her from taking the worm’s possible suffering seriously. Sophia says the creature may know that its two halves will grow separately, but argues that nobody knows how much this hurts or whether the worm fears that pain. She imagines a sharp thing drawing closer and calls the response instinct. She rejects the idea that the animal’s smallness or digestive canal proves it cannot feel pain, insisting instead that the injury may hurt, if only briefly. The book’s scientific vocabulary and its uncertainty coexist with a moral insistence: the limits of human knowledge do not justify assuming that the animal feels nothing.

Sophia then gives the separated halves a possible history. In her account, the person with the hook goes away; the halves cannot grow back together because they are terribly upset and do not stop to think. They expect eventually to grow out again, look at each other, and crawl apart. Only afterward do they begin to consider that life will be different, without yet knowing in what way. The imagined sequence moves from bodily shock to separation and then to an unresolved awareness of change. Sophia is not reporting observed worm behavior; she is trying to make an unknowable experience intelligible without pretending to know everything about it.

Questions of Agency and the Book’s Ending

Sophia extends the imagined division into a question of identity and choice. The back end wonders whether to grow a new tail or a new head, whether to keep following or become the part that knows best. It also considers the excitement and danger of coming apart again. These possibilities make the division more than a change in shape: Sophia imagines each half facing a different future, and asks whether the roles of follower and decision-maker might shift.

She also imagines a contrasting possibility for the front end: it may enjoy having nothing dragged behind it. Yet the ending refuses to settle what either half wants. Sophia’s final thought is that nothing is easy when a creature might come apart in the middle at any moment, followed by the blunt rule, “you should never fish with worms.” The warning gives the fanciful chapter a practical ethical conclusion: fishing with worms means using a living creature as bait, the very use named in its opening sentence.

Grandmother calls the chapter the end of the book and the end of the paper. Sophia corrects her: there will be a Chapter Two, but she will work on it tomorrow. The book therefore remains unfinished, as does the question of what the separated halves will become. Angleworms matter here not because the story supplies a definitive account of their biology, but because Sophia’s attention keeps returning to what remains uncertain: their pain, their awareness, and the lives they might lead beyond human use.