Ghost Apple Worms

Ghost Apple Worms

Most worms don't bother with Ghost Apples. They barely exist, after all. Perfumed gauze bundled under paper skins. Skeleton trees growing crooked and bent from dry rock. They fruit and they fall in a single cold winter morning. By night they've melted into a pale stain. Only ghosts eat them. (Ghosts don't eat things per se, you see. They eat the memory of things. The experience of having eaten them. It's why when you leave food out for them, you leave out something they loved in life. If it's cooked with love, the quality doesn't matter.) They say Ghost Apples taste like long summer afternoons and sticky fingers and a footrace with your friends and green grass and smiling farm boys and a thousand other things. To me they just taste like cotton balls. But I suppose I'll find out sooner or later.

Some worms rather like Ghost Applies. Their parents are intransigent things, like mayflies made of dust and loose hair. They eat the seeds first. They don't digest them, just keep them bundled up inside like a little heart. Then they grow, spreading roots through the apple, wrapping their skin around its own, breathing themselves full of steam until they're so big they fall from the tree, and land on their feet.

Apple Worms are curious little things, almost cat-sized, their segmented bodies filled with meat fluff and smoke. Pale and glossy and thick, they look like big juicy peeled shrimp, ambling around on six tiny childlike hands attached by fat, stubby little arms. Pale, slit-mouthed, bug-eyed faces stare innocently out at the world. They smell delicious. They taste delicious. They want desperately to be eaten, in their mewling, pathetic way, and will crawl down chimneys, climb through windows, and wrench hands away from mouths to make sure you get a nice big bite. They are only as strong as a child, but there is never only one of them, and if enough work together, they can do startling things.

They taste, or so they say, like what their parents first tasted, when they burrowed down into the Ghost Apples to lay their eggs: like rich buttery meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, like napping by a warm fire, like finding your way home after too long in the dark. 

When you eat an Apple Worm, you do not digest it. Instead, it paws at your intestines, curls up in your stomach, and begins to pupate. You can swallow cold iron (a few shavings are enough) to try to kill it, or at least drive it back out, and if you are lucky, the pupation will not occur. 

When it does, it happens like this: First the Apple Worm falls asleep. It dreams its little wormy dreams, which fill up its head with steam. Eventually, its head becomes so full that it explodes. Then the same happens to the next segment, then the next, then the next, and so on, until it has shellacked your insides. The steam winds its way through your soft tissues and makes them softer, like steaming a dumpling, until it finds its way into your lungs. It is heavier than air, and makes your voice low and dusky. When you exhale, you will release a mist of adult Apple Worm flies from your mouth. They are so insubstantial and so numerous that it almost looks like seeing your own breath in the cold (but not quite). When the flies are all gone, the remains of the worm will melt from you, and you will pass them.

In the Enduring Empire, Apple Worms are popular pets. They can be loyal and clever and very affectionate, and the citizens of the Empire, organs all safe in their canopic jars, can handle them without worry. This fashion has especially taken hold among the alchemist houses of Verdigris, where you can buy lace worm-clothes and collars with little silver bells, and all manner of different luxury worm foods. An Apple Worm's stomach is very sensitive, you see, and cannot tolerate much in the way of flavor, texture, or temperature, and even a drop of poison will kill them. The mulch of dead leaves is healthiest for them, but they will eat most anything. If they are poisoned, they die horribly and dramatically, swelling with colored smoke until they burst like balloons. Among the noble houses of the alchemists, where poisoning is a constant and ever-changing threat, the assistance of a loyal food-taster is invaluable.