Music Lesson

I can’t say for certain which music I’m enjoying more – Susumu Yokota’s Asian ambience on the laptop or the garden’s new water fountain concert.

Mr. Chipmunk, the gaudy flutterby, and the fledgling redwings all clearly prefer the fountain. And why wouldn’t they? What do they know about synthesizers, electronic percussion, or the meditative properties of fluid melody transformation? For them, the fountain’s water, singing its spontaneous aria, is life itself; is the music without which their lives—all lives—would cease to exist.

I reach out and tap the laptop’s mute.

Some creatures—most creatures—know far more than I.

From Guest Contributor Ron. Lavalette

Ron’s many published works, including his debut chapbook, Fallen Away, can be found HERE.

Getting Under Her Skin

After a pupa has transformed into an adult moth, even a scientist has a difficult time connecting the new form with the old.

Similarly, when mild-mannered Bruce Banner gets antagonized and changes into the Hulk, it's hard to believe they are the same individual.

There are many examples of such disparate metamorphoses in nature.

But nothing can be so shocking as the enantiodromia my mother undergoes after she discovers that I've forgotten to do my chores. Where once was a loving parent who'd literally give her life for mine, now there's a raving lunatic intent on cutting short my existence.

The Transformation

As Gregory Samson awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a giant chicken. There was no doubt but that he was monstrous.

Gregory feared the ridicule of his peers. He dwelt on past incidents, when others had been shunned for smaller variations. Differences were not well tolerated in his society.

He rose from bed and stumbled into the yard. What before had seemed an entire world was now barely able to contain him. He had grown so large he could easily hop the fence.

How Gregory yearned to be a normal-sized chicken again.