“Art, you going to work that same old desk job the rest of your life?” Roy said staring down the end of his fishing pole.
“I don’t know. I hope not.” Art reached into the dirt inside the old plastic margarine container to dig out another night crawler. For some reason when he went to gather the worms they always hid directly under the surface of the leaves on top of the dirt, but once he put them in a margarine tub they all hid together at the bottom under as much dirt as they could manage. It was as if they knew the end was near.
“Hope not? I wouldn’t work that job for a day longer than I had to.”
“Well right now I have to keep working there to pay the bills. I make good money Roy, real good money. It’s not the kind of thing you just walk away from.” Art found the end of a night crawler and started to pull it out of the dirt. The creature stretched to its full length becoming thin in the middle as Art pulled on what might have been its tail but very well may have been its head. He wondered how a creature so slick and cylindrical provided any resistance to his pull, but every worm always managed to exert an effort to remain in the wet darkness it preferred as if it was holding on with hands and feet that somehow disappeared with the presence of light.
“Life is too long for all that.” Roy said back.
“You mean life is too short?”
“Naw. I said what I mean. Life is too long to keep doing a thing you don’t really like. If life is going to draw on like it does day after day you are better off making use of it if you are going to be here awhile.
- a snippet from a novella I am working on called "The Art of Roy"
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