Fragile

by Betsy Sholl

In college we had a long walk uphill to our classrooms. Rain in the fall, rain in the spring brought out hundreds of earthworms, as if they were spawned by rain, as if they were rain made visible and scrawling messages we left discarded on the ground. I shrugged. But inside I shivered, as naked under my clothes as they were out there on the path, trying to keep from drowning. I don’t know why this spring, in the season’s endless rains, I’ve begun noticing them again. All along my quiet road they coil and stretch, frontend inching ahead, pulling the rest behind. So many squiggles and curves, they could be hieroglyphs that crawled off a pyramid wall bearing secrets from the dead. On cold mornings some turn blue and lie on the road like a strand of wet yarn—blue caused by a chemical released in their dying, blue that brings back the color as my niece’s fingers when she was four and her parents rushed her to Boston on a stormy night, and discovered the terrible blue of disease in her lungs. Blue lips, blue fingertips and nails, at twenty she had a transplant which gave her 16 more years, to attend social work school and marry, to love and be loved. Before the disease wore her out, she treated even the most rude or pretentious of us with a patience reserved for the slow or fretful who can’t see beyond their own shadows. Thinking of her, I look more closely at these soil movers, essential workers, creatures living in their skin, blue in their dying, as if what their bodies write on the wet road is a message not to be disparaged.