The Idiot’s Garden (a selection)

 Horsetail grew in thickets along the banks of the river. Far upstream, someone boiled the stems, dried them, flattened them into sandpaper, and put the finish on a rocking chair. Downstream, an elk drank from the river and spit out a veneer pin. And here, nourished by the river, the horsetail grew tall, three or four times the height of the boy now crouched between stems as thick as his neck. He was playing hide-and-seek with his cat, and it was his turn to hide. He tried to keep still and quiet by concentrating on the power lines that hung above his head, four black lines against a leaden sky. They were still. The horsetail was still. The clouds too. There was no wind. The boy heard nothing but an ambient hum, the sound made by wings in the flight to silence, as silent as the jungle would allow. Four parallel lines, and everything still, silent, unhurried, and vastly unknown to him. And then the lines waved slightly, as if in a breeze, breaking his focus. He looked down. The hair on his arms stood on end, but there was still no wind. He heard a sound like a drop of water in a well as the power lines began to shudder and some force gently lifted the hair on his head. A coppery tang filled his mouth, and he looked up again: the lines were at rest. He had just enough time to wonder what was coming before he found out. The power lines leaped violently, snapping themselves free from the poles, and the boy tried to call his cat’s name as the thicket of horsetail bent sideways under the foot of a whale. The boy felt the wind displaced by the foot against his cheek. He looked up. Four slack lines hung from the whale’s mouth. She swallowed and took another bite, stripping the nearest pole of wire before moving to the next, her tail held rigid for balance. The boy began to cry: at her immensity? This dark blue wall advancing? He couldn’t move, couldn’t cover his ears as she cried out, either to him or a distant mate or all the things standing in her way—a call fractured in time, all the more unbearable because so much of the sound hung below the surface of human hearing, the full melody buried even as the fragment available to the boy’s senses was enough to ring his ears through the next morning. She walked on, slowly. The boy wiped his nose. It was terrifying to be born a thing that can change its mind.