Spiders were crawling up the edges of the portal into another world. Whenever a spider had reached the top, a blue light appeared and turned the insect into a flower that fell down in front of the machine. Soon the ground around Emma’s feet was covered with blossoms in many colors. The professor turned to the alien commander next to him: “What’s happening here,” he said. “We’re turning the spiders into flowers,” said the alien. He looked like an ugly lobster with pointy black knobs for eyes and a bright pink rump. “But why would you do that,” said the professor, who was a highly skilled specialist in many scientific disciplines and trained to look for hidden meanings and causes. He spoke so many languages so well that he himself sometimes wasn’t sure which one was his mother tongue. He was so erudite, so well educated and removed from his childhood that often he couldn’t even remember his own mother. “Are you doing it to bend the structure of the physical space-time continuum?” said the professor. “Are you perhaps manipulating matter itself to teach us a valuable lesson? Do you mean to suggest that spiders and flowers came from the same tree of life and that we ought to be more circumspect of them? Or does the pattern of plants hide a mathematical formula, which will help us solve the energy crisis?” The professor had become frenetic: “Tell me, my friend from another galaxy, why is this happening?” – All the while, thousands of spiders had marched up the sides of the giant, door-like structure and subsequently, exposed to the blue light, dropped to the ground transfigured into blooms. “Oh no,” said the alien commander and scratched his behind, “none of that, none of that at all, we just thought the girl would look beautiful standing in a sea of flowers.”
#25/1000. Listen to the podcast. Photo: Long Corridors by Jennifer Tomaloff. Text by Marcus Speh published in Wilderness House Literary Review 6.3.
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