by tamara knight
There are things in the trees. Little, invisible, prickly spindly things. They are everywhere. Even if you live in an apartment they are there. Even on city blocks where there are only tall buildings and car exhaust, they are there. They are there on the weeds you step on that grow out of cracks. They are on the moss that grows on one side of an old building. They are mean, nasty, little things. And they do not like us. They are perfect, and we are not.
One day soon, at night while we sleep, or by day when we stare absent mindedly at a computer screen and wonder what we ate yesterday for lunch or who won last nights game or why so and so said such and such to us, they will sleek off the trees and the weeds and the moss and come among us. And though I do not wish to tell you this, for it is harrowing, they shall slay all of us. There will be no pain or unpleasantness for they will merely evaporate us leaving small piles of dust and salt where we stood or sat or lay, and this of course, they will blow away into the wind with tiny fans they keep with them. They are tidy.
Then when only the prickly, spindly things are left, they will expect things to be much better, for perfection to have finally have arrived on the earth. They will join together and sing a song of victory. But once their song is over, and they have had days upon days of their perfection, they will grow weary and bored with it. They will begin to realize that without the illicit, without deception and subversion, nothing is no longer of any interest. They will have the option of then becoming corrupt, but they will not like this; it is simply not the way of the spindly, spirally things.
Instead, they will just sit there and contemplate how foolish they were to have thought that perfection could be their lot. And they will pine and long for the humans that are no more. They will sing sad songs and compose poems and odes to the worst of us until they have exhausted the last of their potential, until the sun has burned itself out, and they gradually fade away into the dust, sad little things to the end.
wow!!! this was brilliant! i am going to read the fourth time now!
Wow! I love the whole sad tone of this. I think it’s a bit sad that the spindlies will regret the passing of our imperfection and not any of our nobility, art, science, etc. Mind you, naughtiness is always more intereting than goodness I suppose.