New Flash Fiction: Moon Worms by Gary Every

It's our great pleasure to welcome back another regular Grievous Angel contributor – Arizona-based Gary Every – with a short poignant tale looking back at the demise of manned space-flights to the Moon... and of the demise of the astronauts who flew those trips. Gary's work has been previously published in Tales of the Talisman, Dreams and Nightmares, Mythic Delirium and many others including four nominations for the Rhysling Award for Year's Best Science Fiction Poetry.

Moon Worms
by Gary Every

The worms go in, the worms go out
Into your stomach and out your mouth
Your eyes fall in, your teeth fall out
And your brains come tumbling down
....Traditional Children’s song

I remember watching the first lunar landing as a child, family gathered around the television. I was extremely unimpressed. I was a big fan of Sunday Afternoon Science Fiction Theater and I had seen countless men on the moon, untold alien invasions, to say nothing of creatures returning from the grave, so a bunch of guys in big clumsy suits stomping awkwardly wasn’t television I found too exciting. Besides at that age, with the grades that I was receiving in school, I believed that someday I would travel to the moon myself, maybe be among the first colonists on Mars, or even journey to the stars.

So here I sit, decades beyond being a child and there is no space travel in my immediate future and quite frankly an immediate future is all I have left. I have reached the point where I can be considered middle aged only if I live to be over one hundred years of age. It looks as if the promises they made to me about the future availability of space travel were bald faced lies. Where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars!  

Neil Armstrong said those famous words when he first stepped on the moon “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” but we haven’t done a whole lot of walking since. Like an infant child, mankind seems to have fallen down while learning to walk among the galaxies. I still hope that someday man will learn to engage in space travel but it appears as if any progress will take place long after I have shed this mortal coil.

The more I think about it – the sadder I get. One by one the astronauts who stepped on the moon are dying off. It was always a small and exclusive club but as they pass away one by one it is becoming smaller and more exclusive. When one thinks of what a celebrated moment the moon landing was, everyone on the planet watching the first moon landing together. Those first views looking down on the whole earth ignited the environmental movement. It is something of a tragedy that soon there will not be a single human being left on this world who can remember what it feels like to stand on the surface of another planet. The astronauts commented how they were moved nearly to tears viewing our earth floating in the cosmos like a brilliant blue marble, fragile, alone, and tiny.

One by one the astronauts are passing away, buried in cold and lonely graves which are still not as cold and lonely as the surface of the moon. How ironic that as they die, their memories are buried with them while their footsteps on the lunar surface may remain undisturbed for a million years.  

William Shakespeare once wrote “To sleep perchance to dream – ay there’s the rub” and perhaps the lunar astronaut’s memories will not die with them. Scientists have been able to teach flatworms how to solve simple mazes. If you cut the flatworms into three or four pieces, not only will each of those pieces survive but each piece will know how to solve the maze. One has to wonder about the astronauts lying still and motionless inside their graves but maybe the graves are not that lonely. 

After all as the morbid children’s song says, “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out…” Do the astronaut’s tombstones tremble as the grave beneath is filled with a mass of writhing, feeding worms. Are worms, these humble, hungry creatures the last beings on earth to remember what it feels like to stand on another world and gaze upon our home planet? When the worms sleep (do earthworms sleep?) do they recall the astronaut’s memories of standing on the surface of the moon? When the earthworms dream (do earthworms dream?) do they ever dream of outer space and travelling amongst the stars? I hope so.