evolution
by Nubia
I
It always begins with her inventing new ways of being, then behaving in those ways, then accepting the consequences for being unpredictable as there is always some starved variety of human insecurity somewhere in this world searching for something to pin down under its feet and feed on.
II
The odor invaded the noses of the neighboring population. Thousands of nostrils were saturated with the sour sweat of the modification. She unstuck the stick of her skin, restructured the encasement, then slid back inside the fresh hide that now took the shape of something inhuman, something resembling an antelope, but prehistoric and reptilian.
She couldn’t have predicted the smell. The unpleasantness of egg dissolved in molasses that drifted into the distance and beckoned anyone curious closer. What had been an intimate operation, a private unpeeling and resealing with no arranged invitations, had become a full-blown circus exhibition for those in the background still postured on two feet.
She would have imagined it differently. Interrupting this first-of-its-kind encounter should have been a more obvious imbalance of power with the law of the land siding with the life most susceptible to sudden adaptation. Her quadrupedal posture, hyper-sensitized fight-or-flight animal nature, nine hundred pounds of jawbone bite pressure, all seemed to transcend her superior once liberated from the body and behavior of her former species.
There was no precedent. No narrative passed down through the generations that explained to each successive cluster of unknowing children how best to habituate with beasts bred from blood not unlike their own. There was only the guttural thrust of instinct that cautioned against more unfortunate times when limbs got tangled in the teeth of dangers unidentified. Like their ancestors they carried their wisdom behind the navel and above the rectum. While the modernity of their minds and bodies suggested the delicate approach of diplomacy, a more ancient system of nerves and adrenaline fought the fight against free will and won.
When there wasn’t much left to be desired, no novel shape to take in hopes of being renewed, improved, inspired. When the wind swept up the intolerant scent of them into the aperture of her intuition she licked around inside her mouth, felt the roof, then tapped against her last human tooth, a lingering anatomy, that leaked the cement taste of civility before being pushed up and out from the root.
The individual became a collective, the collective selected a leader, the leader provided direction, tension thickened into action, and she witnessed, without resistance, verdict and appropriate punishment become the heart of this uncompromising moment. Their crude tools pierced into her chest. Her teeth wrapped around some anonymous human neck. No omniscient observer could have known who was more primitive.
III
It always ends with her propped up on top of a cloud, or hanging on to the underbelly of the moon, or the nude backside of her body welded to the surface of a star. It is always some celestial awkwardness. A figure bent over into herself with her face resting on her knees, loosely cocooned, adrift in the heavens, hoping to land on something soon. Something soft, or metallic, or red-hostile-volcanic, something as odd and alien as her abandoned humanity.
