An Oldie But A Goodie

How to be Some Sort of Beetle

Your legs clackel over soft crumbles, and your feelers twitch, and tell you the future. The future has food in it, the food that falls apart in the ground and warms the body and hardens the shell. You see with your seers the way ahead, and smaller ones cross you, and larger ones. And food is still in the future.

Continue: The ground shifts and stranges, and you can feel the empty-moving pushing down the wrong way, and struggle but the world is rearranged, and your legs waggle and wiggle but can't find a grip, and your feelers tell you that up has turned into down.

And you panic! Up must not be down never never never never never, and your legs flail and fling and your feelers twitter and twatter and your upside opens and your upside-legs whap the upside-ground and down must never never never be up--

And then it's down again, and up is up. And there is still eating in the future. And so you clakcel on. And now your legs find a crumbling ground to land on, and now a jumbled ground, and now they must pull you over stringy things and tufted things, and over fluid ground that trickles away and away to far off elsewhere.

And you can taste the future in the empty-above. And in your shell hardness you're warming and glowing in the feast that's foreseen.

And then it happens.

And then IT happens!

There are powers and pressures that punish and pinch!

There is squeezing and crunching and crushing and pain!

And up will never be down again, and up is not even up, and your legs wraggle and your tearing-face hisses and your upward-legs flutter! And everything stops being anything and nothing is anything forever.

**

Your legs clutter on hardness forever in every way. Your feelers are telling you strangeness, and others, and nothing like food. Your up-legs are telling you nothing, and you don't wonder why you thought you had up-legs, and you remember that you don't.

And onward: The future is a circle that has walls you cannot walk on, and it is filled with others and hunger. And now your feelers tell you changes, and yous ee now grass in the future, now crumbles land on your shell and your head, and everything shudders and trembles.

And now there is an other. And you see it with your seers and feel it with your feelers. And then you know:

The other is food!

And you are hot now and hotter, and hazy and hazier, and the world is the smell of eating! And your legs twirl and trample and flail and fling and your eaters are clacking and clamping, the other one writhing and wriggling and now yours! your're inside and the other is gory and gooey, you taste it now warmer and redder, fluttering hot and frenzy, it slurms through your eating place into yourself that's inside of your shell, and now you are warmer and redder.

And the world is strange. And the future is strange. And your feelers feel the others surround you and see you and feel you and taste you on the empty-above. And they move on many legs, and they move with venom stabbers, and they move with the up-legs in many directions.

And now there is another other: and this one is another of you. You feel its feelers and smell what it is, and the smell is now hunger and anger and fighting. And it makes itself larger and gnashes above, and wails its legs and crashes and clacks! And you can feel that you're cracking and your legs scramble backward, and the other is taking the food! The food must always be yours, and never never never be taken! And forward you're scrambling thrashing your eating-parts clacking your clackers and hissing and screeing, and now you crack! And the other moves back on its legs and you crack! it again with your great hardy eaters, up on your legs and gnashing the air! And the other goes back, and back into faraway and the treasure is yours, the food that warms you the goo that sustains.

And the everywhere continues in strangeness. You drag off your prize to a lump of tufts and fiber, and scree at a smaller thing already there, a one that clamps with the end of iself and scrambles down low on many small legs. It backs itself clicking away, and you burrow your legs back into the sinews. But nothing is still the same! And the world seems shifted and you can't feel what's ahead, and the future is danger in every direction, danger from frightening panicked and frenzy, and fearsome trapped hatefulness pours into your mind.

And now: there are deaths approaching. The seers that see are seeing right through you and your feelers are threatened and frightened and feel of a future of cracking and pain, and venom-strike stabbers are gathering closer and eaters to clamp off the whole of your head, and inside you grow warmer with terror and cornered, and many-claws clack at your head, and jaws that bite are biting toward you and the pattering clatter of toomany legs are clattering at you, your feelers feel fighting and killing and a clack! on your head and a snack! on your shell, a thing grips your leg and a thing grips your eeler, you flail your face cracking another thing's head, and it falls off to be eaten by some other thing else.

And now the world is burst! You fall and shift and everything stranges! You're jostled and jounced and your leg breaks away and your feelers feel less but feel broken in half, and downside turns upside and jumbles and falls, the herenow is shuddered the future is shattered, and the feelers feel nothing and the seers see no more!

**

The grinding ground crumbles with the clack of your legs, the legs that feel forward the way into Time. Your feelers feel little, and you don't wonder why, and you remember they never are very much good. Nor do you wonder the count of your legs; you remember that always you feel to one side.