The Cuckoo Colloquium

23 - Nini

"I catch frog for dinner," Dim said as they trooped along, "we eats luxury meal."

Nini let out a soft moan, hiking behind the two boys-her right eye pulsed and prickled horribly; it felt like it had severed from its optic nerves and was just floating freely in its own hellish world, and Nini had no more control over it than she had input in the evening's dinner menu.

She was starving, but her stomach would never allow a frog anywhere near it. She knew the idiosyncrasies of her digestive system, and amphibians were not on the list, no matter how desperate things got. So she moaned again.

Dim now wore a white bandana on his head in place of the black bowler hat he had lost in the flood. "Wearing the white tell spirits we mean no harm," he had told them.

Dim never elaborated on who, or what, these spirits were supposed to be, and Nini doubted that the 'spirits' were all that conservative, since they seemed to have no problem with the I-got-laid-in-Thailand T-shirt.

The sun was setting and the bulging river was smooth as glass. A slight breeze blew through the stilled jungle sundown as they skirted the grassy bank of the waterway. Dim was leading them back to where they had camped before the cruel flood scattered everyone and everything.

Nini didn't see the point.

"We couldn't be more lost if we tried," she half-mumbled to Puso ahead of her, and he turned around.

"We're in a rain forest, the lungs of the globe, so to speak. It nourishes the whole world, doesn't it? ... We'll be just fine."

'Is that supposed to be an answer?' Puso could be so irritating, especially when he started acting all leader-like. Did he envision himself as some great Prime Minister, the world's first Premier-with a bone running through his little Coney Island Dog?

She scanned the forest as they walked, but didn't recognize anything; it was as dissimilar in its sameness as swimming pool water from ocean water.

She could hear it, though-Nini could hear the water vapor slithering through the trees above. She twisted the bottom of her T-shirt, and the water poured through her little fist like a badly leaking faucet.

Dim bent down, and Nini watched him pin a long centipede with his hand. Shunning its poisonous mandibles, he nipped its head off with his thumbnail and dropped it into his pocket. Then he turned his head, listening to the forest, hearing sounds Nini couldn't hear, so she and Puso contented themselves by watched Dim's wriggling pocket.

"It's still squirming."

Puso nodded, "It doesn't know it's dead."

The trek continued, and Nini turned and walked backwards for awhile, flabbergasted at how all the wood, and the branches, and the vines, and the twigs, and the leaves, and the undergrowth, and the overgrowth-how it could all swallow you up like you were just some miniature chocolate mint.

To Nini, the jungle fiasco had become like her desert diorama catastrophe of seventh grade. She had spent weeks on the diorama, and then carefully placed it in the basket of her bicycle. But some idiot boy crashed into her on the way to school, joggling the box. When she exposed it in science class, her diorama looked anything but desert dioramic; more like sewer plant sludge-the sand dune covered the mesquite tree, and the saguaro cactus was murdering the coyote. She got a B in that class-branded for life-and because of a boy. Naturally.

That was when her current adventure took another bizarre turn-by walking backwards Nini spotted one of the most illogical things she had ever seen in her life: the strange dwarf, the one with the pith helmet and the green jacket, rustling through the foliage on the opposite bank behind them...