Transit of Nereid (Based on a True Story)

My cousins Jamie and Maggie and Bella and my grandma and all the aunts and uncles were all there. As soon as we hit the island, the clouds rolled in and didn’t leave no matter how much I asked it to stop raining. I would spend the mornings reading a tattered fantasy novel using a scrap of wrapping paper from when I got it last Christmas, propping the volume up conspicuously on the breakfast table to provoke my aunts into calling it satanic atheist indoctrination. They never took the bait. My cousin Maggie did, though.

“Why are you reading that? You worship the devil?”

“I’m atheist, retard,” I retorted, using the most abrasive words my twelve-year-old self could muster. Maggie’s face immediately crumpled.

“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you called me that, you have to forgive me!” 

“Forgive you?” 

“Forgive me!” she shouted. 

“That’s not what that means!” I couldn’t believe she was a year older than me. Her mother, Clarissa, heard the whole thing from the next room over. That’s how I found myself driving around the perimeter with my dad and my uncles to inspect the fencelines in the warm, drizzling rain. 

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It was after a similar incident that I found myself in my grandma’s lime-green bedroom, sobbing face-down on her duvet. She asked what was wrong, but didn’t press me when I was unable to answer. I still don’t remember what it was that had upset me so, but I stayed in her room for the rest of the day, she reading her Bible Made Easy and I reading my atheist devil-worship, listening to the rain spatter on the tin-roof. The next day, I went back to her room early in the morning, before anyone else was awake. We were always the earliest risers, but would have to whisper so as to not wake everybody else. 

“Do you want some green tea?” 

“Some?” Her hearing was bad, even when we weren’t whispering. 

“Green tea,” I repeated.

“Oh, I thought you said Grand Teton. Like the mountains.” She took her bookmark out of the book she was reading and handed it to me. 

“Won’t you lose your place?” I worried. 

She took the wrapping paper from my book. “Let’s trade.” I examined the card she had handed me. It was a pen drawing of the most beautiful lady I had ever seen, holding a large volume, veiled and in front of a pomegranate tree. “The High Priestess. It means, ‘not everything is what it seems.’” I took the card and gazed at the Priestess. The closer I looked, the less it looked like a face. 

Over the next couple hundred millions of years continents shifted, collided, and sank into the earth. Mountain ranges were germinated, then went to seed. New civilizations sprung up, then collapsed, like wildflowers do each spring. All was peaceful. 

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There was a worm and its name was Teewinot. It did not remember how it got this name, nor how long it had been Teewinot. It simply was Teewinot. 

Teewinot was one trillion one hundred forty-five billion four hundred forty-six million nine hundred sixty-nine thousand two hundred and one miles long, and the width of a normal earthworm. It could wrap around the earth 46 million times, and it did. It would swim through the soil like it was water, endlessly passing soil and nutrients through its interminable digestive tract. When Teewinot needed to outsource labor, say offworld, it would segment off regular earthworm-sized units a couple inches off the tail end, and send them away. They were not part of a hive-mind; they were still Teewinot. When they were ready to return, they would simply die in the soil, decompose, and become part of Teewinot again. Teewinot did not know why, but it liked this. Teewinot had been the only living being on Earth for the past hundred thousand years. He, she, it was everybody and everything that had lived before, and was not planning on going anywhere. 

🪱

I closed my book gently, with no sound. This year, I got the lime-green room to myself. My grandma was gone, but the beach was still there, and the rain, exactly a year later. So were Jamie and Maggie and Bella and all my aunts and uncles. I had grown six inches earlier that summer with no sign of stopping. I had stretch marks on my knees, and I had no-one to go to when I couldn’t find my High Priestess. 

I borrowed my mother’s field guides and walked along the beach, alone, prodding the beach rubble. Among the washed up man-o-war bodies I saw a desiccated little worm. Alitta succinea, the Golden Guide to Seashores told me. A nereid. I scooped up the sand around it and threw it with as much force as I could manage back into its home, the sea. Aunt Clarissa came out with a grinning chihuahua and a dejected poodle and sat next to me. 

“If you are going to be out here by yourself, could you at least take the dogs? I just want you to be safe out here.” She knew I hated dogs. 

“I can’t find the High Priestess.” 

“The... I’m sorry?” 

“I was using it as a bookmark. I can’t find it.” 

“I’ll help you find it. Where did you last see —” 

“I bet Maggie took it,” I interrupted. “She thinks I worship the devil.” 

Clarissa sighed, and left me with the slobbering, simpering dogs. She returned a few minutes later. “Maggie ate it.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She left me one last apologetic look, before going back inside. “She likes to eat paper, these days.”