Thrust: A Novel

Morning. The scent of river water, dirt, tree bark, and tiger lilies and a tiny grunting sound. Being awake meant moving toward a fountain, as the turtle had said: “Go to the fountain with the turtles spitting water.” Laisvė opened her eyes to orange and yellow: the smell of orange and yellow, the image of orange and yellow, and that curious tiny crunch or grunting sound that came with the colors. She pushed herself to sit still, with her hands in the dirt.

The dirt moved.

A tiny voice emerged. “It’s not a problem that you’re here, girl,” the dirt said. “Just don’t get in the way of our labor.”

Laisvė focused her attention closer to the ground. Terrestrial invertebrates. Class: Clitellata, order: Opisthopora, phylum: Annelida. Earthworms. Hundreds of them. Crawling and grunting and eating their way through the roots of a patch of tiger lilies hard by the river. Now that she was paying attention, she could hear a kind of low hum, the chatter of the worms as they worked.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t see you.”

“Typical human. Just mind the ground,” the worm said. “We’ve got all this organic material to get through — protozoa, rotifers, nematodes, fungi, bacteria… and the project at hand, these invasive fuckers. Look at them. With their showy arrogant orange heads. Makes me sick.”

Laisvė didn’t need encouragement to admire the earthworms: their fluid-filled, hermaphroditic coelom chambers, their hydrostatic skeletons. Their central nervous systems, with their subpharyngeal ganglia, their ventral nerve cords, their bilobed brains made from a pair of perfect pear-shaped ganglia. The profound, all-consuming power of their guts. Even their commonplace names were beautiful to her: rainworm, dew worm, night crawler.

But mostly she loved their burrowing and their mating. How, as they drove down into the wet earth, they ate soil, extracting nutrients, decomposing leaves and roots and organic matter, their little tunnels aerating the soil, making way for air and water. How, after copulation, each worm would delightfully be the genetic father of some spawn and the genetic mother of the rest, the mating pair overlapping each other, exchanging sperm with each other, injecting eggs and sperm into each other inside a kind of ring formation, the fertilization happening outside of their bodies in little cocoons after mating, their families untethered from gender or the stupid false suction of the nuclear family in humans. Parthenogenetic.

“The tiger lilies,” Laisvė said gently, aiming her voice down at the worms. “They are so very beautiful, though.”

“Beautiful my ass,” the worm groused.

Laisvė heard a kind of raised murmur of agreement from the dirt.

“That’s how things go, isn’t it? The flashy beautiful thing gets all the goddamn attention. The so-called ugly thing close to the dirt gets the contempt. We move the goddamn earth around this entire planet. No credit. Not from humans.”

Laisvė considered this carefully. Aristotle had called earthworms the intestines of the soil. A few years ago, she had liberated a book of Darwin’s, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, from the library to give it a loving home with her and her father. She held worms in high regard. “I am sorry if I offended you. Anything I can do to help?”

“Your lot doesn’t help. You destroy. We were just talking about this with the mycelium. Hey, mycelium, what were you saying before? About the Amazon?”

A tender fan of white threads surfaced up through the dirt, speaking in a hundred tiny whispers. “It’s true. My god, your ignorance about the flora and fauna of the Amazon — staggering. Do you know there are around four thousand species of trees alone that none of your scientists have even named, much less analyzed? You have any idea how many fungi? I heard you finally ‘found’ a few new species of electric eels, that cobalt-blue tarantula, a couple of new river dolphins. I think also a tree that’s a hundred feet taller than the tallest tree you thought you knew of. At what point do you rethink your whole idea that these are ‘discoveries’? How does that word even have any meaning for you? Something exists just because you finally ‘found’ it? You ‘discovered’ it?”

Laisvė looked away. Her eye lit restlessly on the bark of a nearby tree, then back to her own skin. She felt something like shame except deeper.