Spring

~opossum

The air smelled sweet when you awoke. Dandelions greeted your path, eager to entice your feet to step. The path to the Midnight Pub is beginning to line its cracks with lace of grass and infant seeds. Even at night, when the flowers close and the earth sleeps, the grass creeps along the stone.

You can hear the Opossums skitter in the back of the Pub. They are hungry, just as you were. The Spring will take away their wintry hunger, starting with lamb and ending on mutton. When they are fed, the fog goes away and they once more can write like they did when the snow first fell.

One opossum is fed dandelions and bones. She recounted the taste of memory.

Thank you for the meal. These have a delicate taste of emotional connection. I can feel the scrambling within them, the quivering aftertaste to remind you of what you've taken.

Spring is the end of death, and the beginning of rebirth in the Earth cycle. Everything befallen by winter unfreezes and melts like water, sagging deep down into the soil. They are broken down by the scavengers, hungry and beady eyed and yet so afraid. Their acid will not favor them forever, and they too will break down and return as carbon. They eat what you cannot bear to look at, they swim the waves of dried red seas and with each bite, they retain more of the past. Historians of the palate, if you will, as well as keepers of spongy electrical signals that once held a smile.

Once the carbon and minerals return, others awaken. Plants dig their roots into the ground, wiry worms searching through the dark earth. Blind until they hit connection, and they eat too. They take from the sun, the ground, other beings. Still and yet so full of motion they could not move another inch. They hold hands underground, sharing and spitting into one another warning signs. They stuff their neighbors and pray they can can live through another.

And the story goes the same way we understand above ground. Chew and swallow, mush and mash, turn into energy to liven our blood. No longer do we feel weak, we are strengthened as each colony inside wakes up again. You, too, rouse to the smell of bacon in the morning.

You are wondering why we crunch the bones. I wonder why you create them.

I found that one in the back alley. I think he felt beautiful when he was still, behind a bull of iron and scrap. They roar so loud and die so fast, living younger than my own two years. But this one was special. He was more than a man, instead a clay figure wrapped in fabric. His soft hair fell over his eyes, growing wild and unkempt like the land beneath him.

Man cannot tame nature in any way to affect her DNA. He can only color her hair artifically and make her blood rainbow with oil. She can be contaminated, but there will always be that urge left behind to return. Her hair will still grow as cells pile on top of one another, she will still flinch and cry when beaten no matter how many trees you plant. The cycle governs us all.

As rebirth begins, I urge you all to realize what has woken up inside you. Do you feel happier in some way? Are you inspired to create, to change, to think anew? Are you excited to travel and connect your feet deep into the soil? Or perhaps you prefer to dig into human culture, instead.

Final concensus: The death/rebirth cycle churns within you.

Question: What have you birthed this spring? What have you given to the world?