Evil Flowers by Gunnhild Øyehaug

Author:Gunnhild Øyehaug
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

LEECHES ON THE WRONG TRACK

What could be said about these leeches, which had suctioned themselves onto a fiber-optic cable that had been laid in a forest and through a lake where they lived, other than that they were on the wrong track? They sliced their way through the fiber-optic cable fibers with the tiny razor-sharp calcium teeth in the three jaws inside their two sucker mouths at each end of their leech bodies and sucked out all the thin strands of glass fiber, which carried vast amounts of information that was of no personal use to them. They sucked the fiber-optic cables with such vigor that there was little to indicate that these leeches had done anything else in their lives other than attach themselves onto fiber-optic cables, they were almost professional. One of the leeches was interviewed on TV a month later, and everyone who saw her was struck by her beauty. She had grown much bigger, almost to the size of a human being, and her leech body, which had previously been blackish gray with a zigzag pattern on the back like a red track, was now transparent and glass-like and various colors passed through her in waves as she explained that glass and information were now the latest big thing for leeches. You might not believe it, she said, but one could actually buy leeches in the pharmacy for medicinal purposes up until 1959. One could buy leeches! She shook her leech head in indignation. I know this because of my new fiber-optic condition, I have access to all the information, it streams through me in full, so to speak, at all times of day and night. The anchorman was obviously uncomfortable and not used to interviewing leeches. And they … he said, were also used for bloodletting, is that not the case? Yes, said the leech, we were put on bodies that were sick, because the doctors back then believed it was the blood that was sick, so we had to suck it out of the body. We know all this now, said the leech, before we were just bloodsuckers, annelids about fifteen to twenty centimeters long, with a body divided into thirty-three segments, like other annelids, who sucked blood when the opportunity arose. We moved around in ponds and lakes in our characteristic leech way, which may bring to mind a kind of primordial soup, if there were creatures in primordial soup, they would certainly have been leeches, hahaha, the leech laughed.

How the leeches got back on track, we don’t actually know, the only thing we do know is that they stopped eating fiber and went back to blood, and that they were happier for it. That’s to say—we can only surmise this, it’s not always the case that one has all the information as to why something has transformed from one thing into another, sometimes things change suddenly without a long chain of natural evolution, we don’t actually know that they were happy about it, but we can assume so, as there were no more fiberglass-like leeches on the news.

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