The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

splinters, and a box of sticking plasters. I sat on the metal side of
the white bathtub and examined the hole in my foot. It was a simple, small round
hole, smooth-edged. I could not see how deeply it went, because something was in
the way. Something was blocking it. Something that seemed to retreat, as the
light touched it.
    I held my tweezers, and I watched. Nothing
happened. Nothing changed.
    I put the forefinger of my left hand over the hole,
gently, blocking the light. Then I put the tip of the tweezers beside the hole
and I waited. I counted to a hundred—inspired, perhaps, by my sister’s
hair-brushing. Then I pulled my finger away and stabbed in with the
tweezers.
    I caught the head of the worm, if that was what it
was, by the tip, between the metal prongs, and I squeezed it, and I pulled.
    Have you ever tried to pull a worm from a hole? You
know how hard they can hold on? The way they use their whole bodies to grip the
sides of the hole? I pulled perhaps an inch of this worm—pink and gray,
streaked, like something infected—out of the hole in my foot, and then felt it
stop. I could feel it, inside my flesh, making itself rigid, unpullable. I was
not scared by this. It was obviously just something that happened to people,
like when the neighbor’s cat, Misty, had worms. I had a worm in my foot, and I
was removing the worm.
    I twisted the tweezers, thinking, I suspect, of
spaghetti on a fork, winding the worm around the tweezers. It tried to pull
back, but I turned it, a little at a time, until I could definitely pull no
further.
    I could feel, inside me, the sticky plastic way
that it tried to hold on, like a strip of pure muscle. I leaned over, as far as
I could, reached out my left hand and turned on the bath’s hot-water tap, the
one with the red dot in the center, and I let it run. The water ran for three,
four minutes out of the tap and down the plug hole before it began to steam.
    When the water was steaming, I extended my foot and
my right arm, maintaining pressure on the tweezers and on the inch of the
creature that I had wound out of my body. Then I put the place where the
tweezers were under the hot tap. The water splashed my foot, but my soles were
barefoot-hardened, and I scarcely minded. The water that touched my fingers
scalded them, but I was prepared for the heat. The worm wasn’t. I felt it flex
inside me, trying to pull back from the scalding water, felt it loosen its grip
on the inside of my foot. I turned the tweezers, triumphantly, like picking the
best scab in the world, as the creature began to come out of me, putting up less
and less resistance.
    I pulled at it, steadily, and as it went under the
hot water it slackened, until the end. It was almost all out of me—I could feel
it—but I was too confident, too triumphant, and impatient, and I tugged too
quickly, too hard, and the worm came off in my hand. The end of it that came out
of me was oozing and broken, as if it had snapped off.
    Still, if the creature had left anything behind in
my foot, it was tiny.
    I examined the worm. It was dark gray and light
gray, streaked with pink, and segmented, like a normal earthworm. Now it was out
of the hot water, it seemed to be recovering. It wriggled, and the body that had
been wrapped around the tweezers now dangled, writhing, although it hung from
the head ( Was it its head? How could I tell?) where I had pinched it.
    I did not want to kill it—I did not kill animals,
not if I could help it—but I had to get rid of it. It was dangerous. I had no
doubt of that.
    I held the worm above the bath’s plug hole, where
it wriggled, under the scalding water. Then I let it go, and watched it vanish
down the drain. I let the water run for a while, and I washed off the tweezers.
Finally I put a small sticking plaster over the hole in the sole of my foot, and
put the plug in the bath, to prevent the worm from climbing back up the open
plug hole, before I turned off