I wiggled back and forth. I felt that something was wrong. I wanted to move my arms and legs, but I had none. Suddenly the shell I was in tore. I saw a light that I was chasing. I crawled out of my shell to find that I was lying in the middle of faeces. This faeces seemed several kilometres away to me at first, thinking I was in the apocalypse, but then I saw large grasses behind it. I wondered where I was until I realised my new surroundings: I was a long thin nematode. A parasite that infests animals and humans. How had I become a parasite? Well, I am unique.
Slowly I moved down over the faeces, searching for where to go. As a larva, I was just a few millimetres long. It took a long time for me to get down from the pile of faeces to the ground. I didn't know where I was, why I was a parasite and what I should do now. I moved along the ground until I had the idea to climb onto one of the blades of grass. As soon as I learnt how to crawl properly as a worm, I also had to learn how to climb vertically.
I was lucky that my new body was leaking a liquid. This allowed me to get a good grip on the stalks and climb up bit by bit. It took me a whole day to get up there. I was in a meadow, a few metres of the dung where cows eat grass. While I was discovering a stable, one of the cattle stood behind me. It bit into the straws and me included. A darkness and a dampness surrounded me. In complete fear that the cow would crumble me into little pieces, I moved close to its tongue.
Suddenly he swallowed me with the grass into his stomach.
The way there was through his oesophagus. At the other end was the stomach, where I felt the acid. It tried to separate me into substances. I felt the pain that the stomach acid was causing me. I tried to find a way out by swimming over to its stomach wall and trying to climb up. One after the other, I couldn't do it. 'Fuck,' I thought again, how I had already died once and didn't want to die this time.
Suddenly my mouth opened automatically. It came out like a tongue and probed at the stomach wall for several minutes. At first I was sceptical that this really worked, but then I managed to make a hole through the wall and crawl in. I crawled in further and further until I couldn't take any more. I stopped between the shoulder muscles. I relaxed and fell asleep.
After a while, I opened my eyesight. I didn't know how long I slept. I felt my hunger. Even as a parasite, I had to be able to feed myself. Then I gripped my small, pointed teeth that were in front of my tongue. That's when I began to eat up the muscle fibre around me. It tasted like the odour of animal flesh. To me it tasted more like iron, which is what the parasites feed on. After my meal, I relaxed again and fell asleep.
A few days have passed since I've been in the cow's body. I have learnt that I can hear the outside world. I heard farmers talking yesterday and today, discussing which cow would be slaughtered today. Unconcerned, I let myself back into the cow's muscle as the cow went out into the field to graze. Towards the afternoon they fetched the cow and gave him an anaesthetic.
Slowly the cow fell asleep as they took the saw and started to cut the cow apart. I felt one vibration after another. First the belly was cut apart, then the neck and then the shoulders. The vibrations got louder and louder. Once again I ate my way through the muscle as a saw cut the cow's shoulder just behind me. He then cut off more a few centimetres next to me and threw me into a crate for sale at the supermarket. The transport took place that evening. The next morning, the delivery arrived and an employee put it in the fridge.