Worm Play

        The two boys walked through the park like fevered sex perverts let loose in a soundproof brothel with no exits or windows. They walked in a state of hyper-inflated ecstasy, they took in the beatific visions of everything around them: the tourists, the trees, the grass, fields, insects, a carpet of fireflies that coated the dusk floor of the park. Dan danced a gentle dance among the trees looking for a way to properly focus himself to deal with the situation Pram had rapidly formed. The worm was being prodded with a stick, being burnt with a lighter, then it shriveled up in pain for several minutes of delayed torture and discomfort and they were suddenly sitting there looking at a dead worm, quite drunk, and quite ugly. Pram had poured beer out of his oversized Heineken beer onto the worm before and the thing had looked like it was getting drunk, it was big enough, nearly a foot long. And there was a primitive organism in pain.
        "Do you think it felt anything?"
        "Of course it did, it's fucking fire, that burns."
        "Yeah, but do you think that it really cares that it felt that, that it died?"
        "Worms don't care, they just squiggle around a lot, like a roboticized vacuum cleaner. Why should a vacuum feel anything? 'Don't make sense."
        We stared at the beast of a critter a bit longer and got sick and tired and forfeited and went on back to my place to get higher.