After People, a Sleek One Tends the Garden

THE SLEEPING FLOWER BEDS—Look there, up in that tree…a Sleek One furtively (as much as it can) feeds on the vegetative matter that we now know forms the core of its diet. It is so rare to see one of these crepuscular creatures in the daylight hours that the mind immediately dwells on the portentous nature of its shocking diurnal appearance. Never mind that it is also feeding at least 15 feet off the ground, seemingly with no support, a fact that also deeply unsettles us. Setting darker thoughts aside with much effort, though, let us take this rare opportunity to observe without judgment the wondrous, secretive being as it hovers in the treetops. Watch how it undulates to and fro among the leafy branches, so graceful in its purposive motion.

Meanwhile, down below on the surface not far from where the Sleek One calmly grazes we can observe a small garden of sorts. And in that garden stands a pair of humanoid sentinels, perhaps meant to serve as pest repellents. What is their connection to the Sleek One? They appear to be praying. Perhaps they have summoned the Sleek One from its daytime slumber for some esoteric purpose. Or maybe we have this all wrong. This Sleek One could be a youngling, just recently fledged—left by its parents to fend for itself and now feeding within close proximity of potential predators (or, indeed, acolytes). The mind reels at the prospect of such a relationship, however tenuous, between these genuflecting garden-guardians and the rare one they may seek, floating—known or unknown—above their bowed heads.

Time passes and nothing happens. For a puzzling amount of time, just nothing at all. The mind is numbed by the excruciating lack of progress. But this hasn’t hindered the fledgling Sleek One who hovers buoyant, even ebullient, amid the crowns of the trees, nibbling imperceptibly here and there. The rate at which it consumes the foliage is the exact rate at which the foliage grows back—this has been measured. How to explain this? Is the Sleek One somehow in league with the stasis that has overtaken the garden? The mind reaches but fails to grasp.

But one thing is clear: the two cut-out sentinels—we’ve begun calling them Echo One and Echo Two—are failing at their pest control duties. The Sleek One, our illustrious leaf-chewer, is not the least bit scared. Echo One and Echo Two are little more than interestingly shaped sundials. Hey, wait. We know from a past report that Sleek Ones have a complicated relationship with time. Perhaps it’s not impossible that the fledgling would mistake Echo One and Echo Two for timepieces. Perhaps it has suffered a misfiring of natural instinct, the way a baby bird might mistake a water faucet for its mother. The possible connections between this mistake and the crepuscular creature’s appearance in full daylight boggle the mind.

And the mind, which has become evermore a character in this unresolved scene, can only tolerate so much. So much waiting and weightlessness, so much peopleless indifference and lack of gravity, i.e., so much sleekness. The mind convulses, thinking as hard as it can in the opposite direction. The mind conceives a creature, not sleek, but highly articulated; not folivore, but a flesh-eater—a lion. And because this creature must not be light and ethereal in any way, but heavy, earthbound, the mind has glued it to a brick and thrown it through the window of the story. And so, to the music of shattered glass, something new has entered the garden: a predator.

After such an extended period of waiting, during which it seemed that nothing might ever disturb the placid patterns of activity and inactivity in this eternal garden, the appearance of the lion has released, all at once, the latent energies held in the interstices of this scene and the mind’s apprehension thereof. As the stone lion clatters onto the brick pathway, the Sleek One wheels to regard it, arched in midair now at a slightly higher hover, now tracing a broad figure eight, leaf-brushed. Below, our sundials swivel. Echoes One and Two, it seems, are not static but possess a pivot. With a single motion they creak into alignment with the interloper, as if in accusation, each with one arm raised, a gesture revealed to be not prayer but preparation to strike. A defense system, perhaps, but designed for other interlopers than the sleek one.

Unfixed by surprise, time evolves by leaps.

The glue that had held the predator’s feet in place is already dissolving beneath its fervor to strike. It is a creature shaped by and for the urge to devour. No mere sundial, whatever the arrangement of its limbs, even in multiplicity (or duplicity, should these twinned Echoes possess the capacity for deception) could hope to stave it off. The Sleek One having ceased to consume the foliage, though, in this scene freshly unfixed from the rigid logic of time, the trees surge with a growth that overwhelms the mind’s frame. In the blink of a (mental) eye, the garden becomes a forest. The predator, mid-leap, driven to consume, is swallowed by new leaves. Arcing outside of chronology amidst the failure of its now clearly appointed task to prune such a voraciously verdant arbor, the Sleek One whips down upon the confused predator with a device specifically designed to constrain small carnivores, weaving between new branches even as they shoot out around it. Tangled in saplings, leaves twining its stony mane, the predator is no match for such sleek alacrity. The metal door snaps shut like the jaws it has failed to deploy and a slender shape shoots away. Time has found a new equilibrium, the wood is calm but for the low growl that emerges from a kennel cab.

A mind guilty of a great disruption but in denial of its own responsibility, bored now by the outcome of its unconsidered meddling, wanders away in search of other scenes. But the Sleek One has not in fact departed entirely. Does it still watch? Will it allow such an observer to blithely traipse into the next scene unfettered? If it can trap one predator with such ease, perhaps the consuming consciousness will pose just as little trouble. Oh mind that reads and reviles sleekness, we offer only this warning.

SS, NG, ND

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