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.
