Short-a-Day: Lore Segal's "The Ice Worm"
Originally published in Harper's, May 2011. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 81.A small story, no doubt, but far from a slight one. If Segal had written merely of Maggie's "small ice-worm of panic" upon finding that her elderly mother has been lost in the Kafka-esque bureaucracy of the hospital's emergency admissions center, this would have been nothing new to the genre. Instead, however, Segal spends the firs…