Goines On: Earth to earth

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On Goines and his wife’s first drive to the airport the morning they would fly to Minnesota, before they discovered they’d left a bag at home, she had told Goines of spotting a couple of young deer on her walk the day before, as they were emerging from the remaining forest of the housing development adjacent to the Goines’ neighborhood. That had been the first time she’d seen deer in there, and she attributed it to their loss of habitat.
    And today she told him she had seen them again, or two different deer – these seemed larger than the first two could have grown in less than three weeks. Goines said he’d take his own walk that way, too, to see if he could spot them.
    He didn’t see them, but he did spot an earthworm wriggling violently on the sidewalk and stooped to nudge it into the edge of the grass, from which vantage the worm wriggled in – happily grateful, Goines fantasized – and disappeared.
    Goines remembered the even larger earthworm he had rescued the day before, after coming on it writhing in the road, so far away from grass that Goines had cupped it into his palms to carry to safety. That worm had seemed even more desperate than the one this morning.
    Was it strange, Goines reflected, to come to the aid of creatures for whom humans eventually became food? But he supposed it wasn’t as strange as a worm’s being rescued by a creature who dined on the flesh of nearly as many animals as worms did.

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