not to be worse

story | John Ricciardi art | Patrick Rocard music | David Murphy

Cool sap circulates serenely in sedentary plants. The vegetable kingdom's claim to existence is one long, last stand, with battles waged in volleys of chemical arms. Predators are rebuffed or endured, artfully indisposed in a slow war of attrition, so that plants, given their turgid resistance, have come to be known as stoical foes.

Yet, one summer, when a particularly ruinous infestation of beetles showed no sign of abating; and the long-suffering victims of voracious appetite were chewed even to despondency, one sorrowful flower sought to end the torment by turning its petals away from the sun. It chose solar starvation as the only means to mute the sickening sounds of rip-rip, snipping, and mandibular mastication.

A curious transformation was triggered when the wilting blossom changed orientation. Its calyx, habitually shaded, dried and fused under direct exposure to the day's rays. The form became a pointed pod like a beak, with a few petals sprouting from the top. The effect, remarkably like the head of a parrot, caused the beetles to flee the misshapen flower. Parrots delighted in eating such beetles, and these had learned to keep well out of sight of those. The other plants could not fail to notice the remarkable advantage that a mere change of attitude had conferred upon one of their own. In very little time, most of the field had reversed from perihelion. From the air the meadow appeared an encampment of parrots, all looking west at sunrise, east at sunset.

The insects might have pierced the deception, had no a flock of genuine parrots come to investigate whatever had so attracted their ilk. The birds regaled themselves on straggling beetles, and rather enjoyed the hide and seek amongst false floral siblings. Close by, dwelled a tribe for whom parrot plumes were sacred, ceremonial ornamentation. A hubbub broke out when reports came in from the field of a strange communion between corolla and beating wing. That night, in the moonlight, after dances had been performed to appease whichever genies might be concerned, members of the tribe crept out to behead all the flowers, reaping miraculous foliage with which to festoon their alters.

In the aftermath, those crownless stalks offered easy passage to the beetles. Once within, the insects could burrow down to soft roots. The parrots soon discovered that by splitting the headless, hollow tubes they could pick beetles out for a meal, as if from a straw. At the end of it all, the field was mayhem. Exploded stalks ran radial about the drying roots in so many parodies of the sun. The remaining plants abandoned the mimicry, turning fully their petals to the hottest part of the sky. However difficult the previous straits, nothing had been so bad as not to have a worse.