The little worm lived in a beautiful, overgrown garden. He loved crawling through the green meadow, dotted with colorful wildflowers. The blades of grass tickled his belly. When he looked up, he could see along the green stalks all the way to the yellow dandelion blossoms. Some days they served as a parasol, and others as protection from the rain. He loved the rain, which washed his body clean of the lumpy, dry earth on some hot summer days. In general, he now often had the feeling that the days were getting hotter and the rain fell less and less frequently from the sky. Out of curiosity, but also because he knew this garden inside and out, he looked around in the neighboring garden. This, too, soon became very familiar to him, so he continued to crawl into many other gardens. He didn't notice how far he had already traveled from his own garden, where his friends, the ants, the wild bees, and the woodlice lived. This one garden in particular caught his eye. The garden was like a single, large pattern, which piqued his curiosity even more. When he crawled through the gate, he saw that it was the tidiest garden he had ever seen. Not a single weed, not even the tiniest blade of grass, grew here. If there were flowers, they were in flowerpots made of a hard gray material. In some of the flowerpots, the little worm could even see his reflection. He stretched upwards and looked like a long, thin blade of grass. A brown grass snake. He rolled up with laughter, curled up, and became wide and flat, like dog poop. He crawled in an arc past the flowerpot, and if he had known the Loch Ness Monster, his reflection would have been a perfect miniature version. He played for a while until he noticed that there seemed to be no other insects there besides him. "That couldn't be right!" The little worm thought, "There must be a little friend here too, hidden somewhere under a rock, that I can play with!" "Hello, is anyone here?" His voice echoed from the flowerpots. It remained silent, not a bee buzzing, not a bumblebee buzzing, and not a single fly. Silence! Nothing, absolutely nothing! No matter how hard he tried to crawl up the flowerpots, it was in vain; he slipped on the glassy material. By now he was quite exhausted. And suddenly he heard an unmistakable growling. But that was just his little stomach telling him he was hungry. In the distance he saw something as high as a compost heap, and he quickly crawled towards it. Disappointed, he examined the pile when he finally arrived; it was nothing but stones, artfully stacked on top of each other. Nothing that could satisfy his hunger. Despair spread through the little worm; no friend was anywhere in sight, no helping hand to show him the way back. The way back to the wild gardens was beyond his reach, so weak and tired he was. He would have even been happy to find a bird. If only there was a chance that it would catch him as food for its young and carry him away through the air. With a little luck, he could free himself. But he'd rather be eaten by a young bird than die in this rocky desert. He looked up at the sky; not a cloud was in sight, no rain to wash him away or at least quench his thirst. "What were people thinking when they created this rock garden? The flowers in the flowerpots probably weren't real, but made of plastic! Yuck, ugh, this stuff that never fades and is inedible. Only humans can invent things like that!" Once he found a small red ball in his meadow; it looked so delicious that he devoured it in one go. It took him days to expel it just as he had found it. It was a plastic ball and not a new fruit as he had suspected. Rage and despair spread through the little worm, hunger taking up the remaining space in his stomach. "I'll show you, you stupid humans!" he said bravely to himself as he took the first bite of the biggest stone. He bit down again harder, and a chunk came loose. "Yuck!" he spat it out in disgust. "I have to do it, I have to stop them!" He bit an even bigger chunk out of the stone, repeating this as often as he could and swallowing the biggest chunks, even though he knew it would mean certain death. His belly grew heavier and heavier until the poor worm ripped in half: "Farewell, beautiful world, I did it for your continued existence, be good to me and give me back to a beautiful new life!" he sighed before he died in agony. The earth was very impressed by the little worm's sacrifice; he had given his life as a protest against the powerful humans who were destroying its nature so much. The humans who certainly didn't even notice that this little worm had died because of them. A few weeks later, a person was walking past the pile of stones and saw the hole in the stone that the stoneworm had bitten into. The hole was filled with earth, and a tiny little daisy was stretching out strong and powerfully. The little boy fetched a bottle of water and watered the daisy. From then on, every day, and if he continued to care for his single flower so well, a daisy meadow would grow on the pile of stones the following year, where insect life could once again thrive. And while this little boy could explain to his parents that it's much nicer to have a living garden, with all that crawls and creeps, today this garden is so overgrown that you can hardly recognize any stones. And if there are still stones, moss grows on them, and woodlice and other creatures crawl beneath them...
