The Cuckoo Colloquium

42 - Moonch

Her exhausted, starving body had fallen back on stored calories, and her thoughts were sluggish.

Things were getting loopy for Marilyn Moonch.

On her fifth day alone in the Borneo jungle, she had stopped living and was just lasting-She tried pulling the bark off of trees and chewing the insides, but that didn't go well, and her hunger roared without stop.

She had slipped into unconsciousness during her tussle with the termite-like bugs, and that was a good thing-The insects had then simply commandeered her urine and returned home without the need to fight.

That morning's westward slog began inauspiciously: Heading down a steep slope, she discovered one delinquent termite still on her neck. She swatted the thing off, but her left foot slipped and her balance ceased-Moonch fell, hit the rocky slope on her flank with a loud thud, and began to slide.

"Doreen!" she cried like it was some curse word, grabbing at the loose rocks, but only getting more pains as the sharp stones sliced at her palms.

She seized at a little fern-like plant, but it came out by its stunted roots, her right arm, twisting at a piercingly painful angle as she rocketed into the air like another thirty-foot cannonball was in her destiny, orange scarf waving behind her like a streamer on a kid's bicycle; this time, however, her amazing trick would be performed without water.

She came down on her butt, and that was lucky-It could have been her head. And she screamed, spread-eagled down the slope, waving her left arm only, because the right one had shattered. She rolled a few times and went the final ten feet on her back, sliding into a gigantic green Venus Fly Trap-like plant.

"That was bullshit..."

She didn't move-just laid there, moaning, sniffling, feeling the assorted pains, some sharp, some dull, wondering which would be worse-the sharp ones or the dull ones.

She looked up and noticed the head of the plant-it was staring down at her in shock, like she had frightened it by barging in uninvited.

When she felt a small bit of control return, Moonch got up. The arm was broken, her legs were scraped up good, and her trousers had torn open at the right knee. But then she looked down at the gritty ground, which was almost un-dirt-like, and she realized there was a wide, flat path underneath her.

Luck swung for her like a faithful pendulum-Moonch had found a road!

She had a brand new hurt, and it was a doozy-several Doreen-like bone dislocations happening up and down the arm and elbow, reminding her of the clay pot she had thrown in art class for her mother that fell on the cement stoop of her apartment, now sporting a jagged gash, allowing its inhabitant's roots to grow right on through.

On the good side, she may well have traipsed right into the jungle again, if she hadn't done her crunching cheek-to-cheek with the near-hidden road-such was the state of her stupor-like exhaustion.

The problem was that the road ran in a north-south direction, and Moonch was heading west; as long as she remained undead, she was going west.

"By changing direction and moving in curlicues, I could get lost." Then she laughed, because that was funny.

A compromise seemed in order. In considering her acute level of desperation, she walked north; it seemed shadier that way.

Just as she was rounding a sweeping bend in the road, Moonch saw the men ...

She had a bad feeling about these guys; her impulse was to run off the road and hide behind the flaming red crab-claw flowers. But that would be pointless, because the men most surely saw her first.