WE WOULD LIKE TO CONFESS
Before the Government Spends Any More Money on This
Dear Kash,
We need you to hear this seriously.
We destroyed the grass on the National Mall. Deliberately. With forethought. In one night. We are coming forward because we have watched you deploy the full investigative resources of the Federal Bureau of Investigation onto a lawn and we cannot let that continue. You have grass samples in a federal laboratory right now being analyzed by agents whose career ambitions almost certainly did not include Agrostology.
This is our confession.
We did it. We were responsible.
We’re telling you so you can tell those agents they can go home now.
Tell them you cracked the case if you want to. Tell them whatever will help bring closure to this investigation.
If any of the agents are cynical or simply can’t take your word for it, please feel free to share this letter with them so they can understand exactly what happened.
There were proposals.
At first, we considered herbicide, but quickly decided against that. We talked about using salt. Someone else suggested Vinegar. We had a conversation about goats that lasted nearly fifteen minutes.
It was late. The coffee was bad. And then, Sebastian spoke.
We are giving you his first name only, because his last name is none of your fucking business, but also because Sebastian doesn't want anybody else to take the heat.
“What if we use worms?” Sebastian suggested.
“Ugly Fuck Worms,” he continued. “They’re ugly. They’re effective. They drain the life force out of everything they come into conract with.”
None of us had a clue what an Ugly Fuck Worm was. Sebastian explained it to us in a level of detail that raised other uncomfortable questions we chose not to ask because it was late and we were desperate.
We listened. We took notes.
No one had any questions or objections.
We sent Sebastian to get the worms. He knows people.
And that, Kash, is precisely how we planned it.
If we had it to do all over again, we would probably do some things differently. I say this because we all learned some important things that night.
We learned that the Ugly Fuck Worm has two distinguishing characteristics: an aggressive appetite for grass root systems, and a face that looks like Stephen Miller. Not metaphorically. Literally. Pale, joyless, hairless, wearing an expression of bureaucratic contempt so specific that the first time we saw one we had to sit down.
Here is the part your forensic specialists cannot figure out and we are now going to explain for free:
The Ugly Fuck Worm does not eat grass. It drains it. It sucks the life force out of everything it comes into contact with, not through venom, not through chemicals, not through any mechanism your instruments have a setting for, but through proximity alone. Through presence. Through the sustained application of that face to any living thing within range.
The grass did not die, Kash.
The grass was emptied.
Your specialists are going to find perfectly viable grass cells, structurally intact, biologically complete, yet entirely devoid of whatever it is that makes grass want to be alive. They have seen that face. They have made their choice. You cannot blame them. You would do the same. We all would.
Your forensic specialists are not analyzing a crime scene.
They are analyzing an ecological event.
It was not only the grass.
People in our group reported sudden inexplicable exhaustion. A heaviness. A feeling of being watched by something that finds them deeply disappointing. Sebastian almost fainted. He sat down on a bench and stared at the middle distance for forty minutes. He was fine. Eventually. But something had gone out of him and everyone who knows him has taken notice.
We went through more than two thousand worms. We tried to use stencils. We only had a few hours to execute our plan.
The eight was immaculate. Worms are instinctively circular. They saw the eight and said yes and got to work. Born for it.
The six confused them philosophically. A worm does not stop. A worm continues. Several continued straight off the stencil and had to be retrieved by hand, in the dark of night, which is a sentence we never expected to write in a confession letter to the Director of the FBI, but here we are, Kash, here we all are.
The four required some ninety-degree angles. Worms do not do angles. An Ugly Fuck Worm presented with a corner considers the corner, disagrees with the corner on a fundamental level, and goes around it in a small oval, and suddenly your four looks more like a nine and someone is on their knees on the National Mall whispering please at worms.
Please does not work. We know this now. Sebastian warned us. We thought he was being dramatic.
The seven was a full organizational emergency that we are still processing. A diagonal line reads to an Ugly Fuck Worm as an escape route. Every single worm assigned to the seven followed it off the stencil in a single focused column toward the Reflecting Pool with more coordination and apparent purpose than they had displayed at any other point in the entire operation. We caught most of them. It involved sustained low crouching, vocabulary we are not proud of, and one moment where a Park Police cruiser rolled slowly past us and everyone went completely still and tried to look like the ground.
The worms we didn’t catch are still in the Reflecting Pool. They have been in there for days now. We won't be surprised if the algae decides to kill itself at some point in the very near future.
We did it all in one night. With worms that have Stephen Miller’s face. Using the same life-draining force this administration has been applying to democracy, the rule of law, and the concept of a future since January 2025.
We have given you a confession, a methodology, a species identification, a biological mechanism, and a complete solution to an investigation that has consumed federal resources for several days and produced nothing except some very confused lab technicians and an interagency memo that we would genuinely pay to read.
We did your job for you, Kash. For free. You're welcome.
If you choose to retrieve the worms from the Reflecting Pool, please treat them humanely.
They didn’t choose their faces.
None of us do.
Disrespectfully and without the slightest remorse,
Rook T. Winchester
Editor-in-Chief, Closer to the Edge
Amazing satire!!
Rook you are my hero! ♥️♥️♥️👏👏👏👏👏