My Son, the Sadistic Villain

The Place of Wormly Doom

Yesterday afternoon, my nine-year-old son imprisoned and brutally tortured helpless living creatures. He surrounded them in walls of stone and left the poor devils to starve and die under the sun's cruel rays. Proud, and smiling broadly, he bounded into the house to tell me about it.

"Dad!" he said. "I made a house for worms out from some bricks on the old picnic table! I hope you don't mind -- I gave them two apples."

"Apples?" I said, looking up from my book. "Worms don't eat apples . . ." Then, I remembered all of the pictures from school with the little bespectacled fellow popping out of a red-delicious. "Earthworms don't, anyway. That's a waste of apples."


"What do they eat?"

"Earth," I said. (He looked terrified. It took me a second to catch up with him.) "Not The Earth. They don't devour the planet. Dirt. They get nutrition out of dirt. I think." I scratched my head. "Yeah, I think that's it."

He looked confused.

"Did you chop the apples up -- are they still okay?" I asked. (Still confused.) "We can wash them . . ."

"Well," he said. "I kinda popped holes in them with a stick so the worms could get in more easily."

I sighed. "Well, you should put the worms back in the dirt, anyway."

The Gateway to the Endless Crawl into Eternal Darkness

"Uh, I dropped an apple on one of them. It's sorta squished."

I grimaced.

He grinned a guilty grin and side-stepped out of the room.

I guess it starts this way: building walls around those we profess to want to save and then wasting resources by attempting elaborate solutions that won't really help them, in the end. I'll have to put a stop to this before the boy becomes President.