Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black Read Free Page B

nature is a miracle in the know-how it has provided, ready, in all its millions of varieties of eggs: I hatched from my minute containmentthat the human eye never could have detected on the lettuce, the raw meat, the finger, and began to grow myself. Segment by segment. Measuredly. That’s how my species adapts and maintains itself, advances to feed along one of the most intricately designed passageways in the world. An organic one. Of course, that’s connected with perhaps an even more intricate system, the whole business of veins and arteries—bloody; our species has nothing to do with that pulsing about all over in narrow tubes.
    My place was warm and smooth-walled, rosy-dark, and down into its convolutions (around thirty coiled feet of it) came, sometimes more regularly than others, always ample, many different kinds of nourishment to feed on, silently, unknown and unobserved. An ideal existence! The many forms of life, in particular that of millions of the species of my host who go hungry in the cruel light and cold my darkness protected me from (with the nourishment comes not only what the host eats but intelligence of what he knows of his kind’s being and environment)—they would envy one of my kind. No enemy, no predator after you, no rival. Just your own winding length, moving freely, resting sated. The nourishment that arrived so reliably—years and years in my case—was even already broken down for consumption, ready mashed, you might say, and mixed with sustaining liquids. Sometimes during my long habitation there would be a descent of some potent liquid that roused me pleasurably all my length—which, as I’ve remarked had become considerable—so that I was lively, so to speak, right down to the last, most recently-added segments of myself.
    Come to think of it, there were a couple of attempts on mylife before the present catastrophe. But they didn’t succeed. No! I detected at once, infallibly, some substance
aggressive
towards me concealed in the nourishment coming down. Didn’t touch that delivery. Let it slowly urge its way wherever it was going—in its usual pulsions, just as when I have had my fill; untouched! No thank you. I could wait until the next delivery came down: clean, I could tell. Whatever my host had in mind, then, I was my whole length aware, ahead of him. Yes! Oh and there was one occurence that might or might not have had to do with whatever this aggression against my peaceful existence might mean. My home, my length, were suddenly irradiated with some weird seconds-long form of what I’d learnt second-hand from my host must have been light, as if some—Thing—was briefly enabled to look inside my host. All the wonderful secret storage that was my domain. But did those rays find me? See me? I didn’t think so. All was undisturbed, for me, for a long time. I continued to grow myself, perfectly measured segment by segment. Didn’t brood upon the brief invasion of my privacy; I have a calm nature, like all my kind. Perhaps I should have thought more about the incident’s implication: that thereafter my host
knew I was there
; the act of ingestion conveys nothing about what’s gone down with the scrap of lettuce or the meat: he wouldn’t have been aware of my residency until then. But suspected something? How, I’d like to know; I was so discreet.
    The gouts of that agreeable strong liquid began to reach me more frequently. No objection on my part! The stuff just made me more active for a while, I had grown to take up a lot of space in my domain, and I have to confess that I would find myself inclined to ripple and knock about a bit. Harmlessly, ofcourse. We don’t have voices so I couldn’t sing. Then there would follow a really torpid interval of which I’d never remember much when it was over . . .
    A contented, shared life; I knew that my host had always taken what he needed from the