The Nature Book by Tom Comitta

Author:Tom Comitta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coffee House Press

* Across the jungle, the sky, the water, the bark of the trees, everything that wasn’t green became green. Bright green—green as grasshoppers. A green so bright and emerald that, next to it, vegetation during the monsoons was drab olive. There were so many shades and tones of green—serpent, aphid, pear, emerald, sea, grass, jade, spinach, bile, pine, caterpillar, cucumber, steeped tea, raw tea: how inadequate is our vocabulary for color!

16

IT WAS IN THIS SILENCE AND STILLNESS AND INACTION THAT the thing fell from the sky, something wet and heavy that landed with a juicy, suggestive thwack, like one slab of raw meat falling smack against another from a very great height.

It was disgustingly priapic, about eighteen inches long and fat as an eggplant, and that particular sugary newborn pink one finds only in tropical sunsets or dahlias. But what really distinguished it was the fact that it was moving—something was forcing its thin, unspeckled skin to swell into small bulges before smoothing flat again, the ripples undulating up and down its length like rolling waves.

The thing turned out to be a fruit. A manama fruit. They only grow at this elevation. Out of the fruit squirmed a large writhing mass of grubs the approximate size and color of baby mice, which fell from the fruit to the ground and began wriggling off. Against the moss of the floor, they looked like rivulets of suddenly animated ground beef, worming their way toward some sort of salvation.

Further into the dense uncertainty of the jungle, the manama fruit fell with muffled thuds, each time landing with the same unnerving violence. On the rising parts, other trees—like the kanava, which had heretofore been ubiquitous—began to be replaced by the manamas, until eventually everything, everything seemed to be surrounded exclusively by them and the air seemed to smell faintly of something unclean—new excitement.

Soon the sky seemed punctuated with floating tumors, attached to nothing but suspended overhead like strange pink moons. Below them on the ground, pigs lay, bloated bags of fat, sensuously enjoying the shadows under the trees. A little apart from the rest, sunk in deep maternal bliss, lay the largest sow of the lot. She was black and pink; and the great bladder of her belly was fringed with a row of piglets that slept or burrowed or squeaked.

The scenery, not to speak of the change of climate, was too unexpected to be true. The manama fruit falling with greater frequency beside them, on and on, now east, now west. The animals panting from the heat. Pigs and fruits and concepts moving in three dimensions. This continued till, fifteen yards from the drove, suddenly burst into life the noises—squeakings—and the hard strike of hooves.

Here and there among the creepers that festooned the dead or dying trees, the squeaking increased till it became a frenzy. It was seen at some distance between the trees: something a hawk had dropped in fierce, ecstatic flight: a piglet caught in a curtain of creepers, throwing itself at the elastic traces in all the madness of extreme terror.

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