WHEN A FLORA EATS A FAUNA.

Run, fauna, while you still can!

A flora develops carnivorous knowledge, and it spreads, this knowledge, in hedgerows and alpine forests and scrub formations throughout the land, a fauna disappearing here and there—a real head-scratcher to the schools, bales, coveys, clutches, packs, prides, tribes, colonies, sleuths, and bloats, until one flora, one day, entraps a fauna in public, on the side of the road: the fauna, sitting there, in the flora’s gullet, thinking, “Aw, man, what’ll happen to my radical politics now?” Other fauna stand at a distance from the victim, who nods at them in country manner. “Well, this explains everything,” says one in the crowd. “Not everything,” says another. “It doesn’t explain Wal-Mart, Wall Street, and Kmart, and it hardly explains the general misallocation of resources.” Another in the crowd addresses the victim: “What’s it like in there?” The victim replies, “Itchy.” A second questioner says, “Itchy or ticklish?” The victim says, “It’s making me sneeze. I think I’m allergic to being digested.” The sun sets and the sun rises. Some of the fauna drift off to eat a flora, in the hopes that the predatory flora would change its mind and release their kin-fauna, while others drift off to eat other fauna. The sun sets and the sun rises. Now but a few fauna maintain a vigil at the site of the entrapment. They kindle candles, they chant verses, they clutch teddy bears. “How’s it going?” one of the vigilant asks the victim. “Not bad,” says the victim. “Basically, I’m content. I feel like I can be digested and move on with my life.” Another of the vigilant asks, “Are you stuck? You look a little stuck.” The victim thinks this over. “I am experiencing very, very slow peristalsis, whatever that means. So, yeah. I think I’m stuck.” The sun sets and the sun rises. None of the fauna remain at the site of the entrapment, leaving behind all the materials of their vigil: hollowed out candles; heaps of department store bears; and a jumble of Starbucks take-out cups, raw sugar packets, and wooden stirs. “I guess this is it,” the victim thinks. “Not all herbs are herbivores. It gets so—you want to tax everything and hide in the cellar. It’s a cellar’s market, after all.” He thinks no more. He becomes, for a moment, the flora’s ornament: apple-headed, stubborn, and frozen in mild recognition of some great folly, before the flora, sort of, introduces the fauna into the very fiber of its fiber, acquiring in the digested fauna the essential fears and contradictions of its faunal kingdom, while around the flora wheels a watery wind that will nourish the vegetation in its growing polemic—a brash, wasteful imperialism that startles the very purity of the floral roots.