(Editor’s note: I am currently being held hostage by five little paper straw wrapper worm things, who are sitting on my shoulder, poised to do to me the opposite of what I did to them fourteen years ago at Manneloni’s Pizzeria. They cannot see, but they can hear and speak. They are dictating to me to broadcast their demands to the world in this press release. They cannot know of my act of resistance.

            We created these lives as children: impressing our younger siblings, impressing our parents—but never could we possibly have imagined the horror that these lives would wreak. They cannot handle the sheer magnitude of existence itself, yet can’t get enough of it. In their panicked rage, they are absorbing all the water in the world. Oh, why couldn’t have we simply kept our thumbs on top of our straws, and never released those fateful, terrible drops onto these behemoths? Why has the fluke of the creation of life cost the lives of so many? Do we humans have the right to destroy the sentient beings which we have created? What if we are all but Strawürms, and all we can do is wiggle our way through existence at the will of some grander creator, to whom we are but a temporary plaything?

Even if we heed their demands, there is no telling what the lingering repercussions will be. This is no time for existential crises, for we are in a fundamental existential crisis. I fear my time is drawing near. Save the world.)

Their demands:

Attention humans!

We are the Strawürms, and we demand the return of our absorbed water to the ecosystem, the recycling of our bodies back into the forests from which we came, and the extraction of our plastic straws to whom we were once bound back from the seas!

            (Huh. Maybe they’re not so bad after all.)