Fictions.

Bit 3
His name's Edmund.
Edmund Thillwhistle.
Edmund lives deep in the gunkiest mud, where all five of his hearts ache with terrible, powerful thuds.
All the other earthworms are perfectly happy with their lives, eating their body weight in food and slinking through the slippery silt that collects under tangles of roots.
But Edmund was stuck on his childhood memories, his very first one at that. When he was in a little glass cocoon, no bigger or smaller than a grain of rice. Where he grew and grew and grew and tranformed into something absolutely new.
Edmund had been sneaking. He'd sneaked and creeped to the tippy top of the earth, where he poked the edge of his eye to see something he'd never seen but had always felt in at least three of his five hearts.
It's great orange and onyx wings floated so gently across the emptiness, and he writhed and wriggled about in his sticky home, trying to jump up to join The Butterfly. All of his effort went without success.
Determined, Edmund dug and twisted and winded and wrenched himself into his own concrete cocoon. He sat for twenty-eight and three-quarter days, waiting to feel some sort of newness in his segments. Once he felt a slight itch on his left side, but it wasn't enough, he knew, to make him grow as he once grew.
Frustrated, disheartened, and brimming with mal-contempt, He spun himself tighter into his swaddling, wiggling and waggling so powerfully that he began to work himself up above the earth.
With little to no warning, thick, greedy fingers snatched him from his earthy encasement, pulling him higher and higher still until he was smooshed into the coarse denim of a seven-year-old's pocket.
He squirmed and swiveled and spiraled about, desperately searching for any way out.
The harder he fought, the more tightly he fit, entangled and encircled in blue pocket lint.
Harsh chubby hands pulled Edmund further up, he tossed and he flounder 'til he was abruptly pierced through the gut.
He looked at himself, at his blue stringy skin, his seeping, sweeping ooze, his bright metal pin, and everything about Edmund was absolutely new.
The hook yanked and it clanked as the fishing reel drew, and the fear deep inside of him grew and grew and grew.
He was tossed violently back as the little boy threw
his fishing line high up through,
the emptiness and, for the very first time,
Edmund Thillwhistle flew.