The Cuckoo Colloquium

44 - Nini

Nini waited, breathless, for the column to emerge. "Guess they like to go for a stroll after dinner."

"This IS dinner," the goat said, watching from a distance, "they travel in columns of twenty million. Believe me, you'd go down well as a light snack."

She got on her knees, fascinated with the oncoming surge that marched right out the open door in three columns, fanning to the right and left, the central column marching down the one rickety step, and then into the muddy grass.

"They'll eat you alive, the mandibles, millions upon millions, shearing through your flesh."

Nini shivered as the black wave passed, blind and leaderless, each column an equidistant meter from each other, as if they were on parade, charging forward on each other's backs, moving slowly, incontestably, out onto the runway.

"House cleaning, jungle style," Nini said, returning inside to the wobbly old chair. "Feels cleaner!"

"You're getting cleaned, too ... in a way," said the tinny voice.

Nini poked her toe around on the floor for the little pile, one that was no longer there...

"The ants ate my clothes!"

She jumped up, mortified. "I get rescued in my birthday suit? - I can't put that in the book!"

The cauldron within her, dormant for several days, began to smoke. "Why do ants always eat my clothes? It's a conspiracy!" They ate half a sock before, and now my bra and underpants, everything!"

"They didn't eat you."

Nini threw up her arms. "I can't believe those French surrender monkeys just took off without me!"

"That's an ill-informed aspersion-No army could've stopped the German Wehrmacht in 1940-certainly not your measly Canada."

Nini scowled; the goat could be annoying.

"Come outside," it said.

"Why?" She looked at the entrance for the animal, but couldn't see it. "Where did you go?"

"Who?"

"You!"

She lingered at the doorway, now conscious of her nakedness. "What am I supposed to do now?"

Under the moonlight she saw the goat grazing at one far end of the airfield. "How'd you get down there so fast?" she hollered.

"What are you yelling for?" said the voice, a fidgeting grey-green bird on a branch of the nearby tree. "You still have issues to overcome, don't you?"

Nini nodded, indifferent that the voice now came from a new creature. Yeah, she had issues, all right: Her bad eye had swollen; even worse was that it now throbbed like one of those old-time pictures of men working on the railroad, pounding spikes into railroad ties with giant hammers.

"On our first day here I was walking with Pinky Bell, and I saw an orangutan, collared and tethered to a post. I didn't do anything, didn't give the owner a good tongue-lashing, just walked on..."

"Creeark!" went the cuckoo shrike-to let her know it was listening.

"...And then I thought that nature was getting back at me for not helping that poor, little orangutan, that my eye was punishment for not caring enough; that whatever's in my eye, it's retribution, because I can't be bothered with other people's problems, and maybe I'm a fancy, pink Rafflesia attached to a grape vine..."

"If we're talking parasite," it interjected, "then you're more like a leech."

"...and that's why my parents are divorced."

The frogs and crickets croaked and chirped, and clouds obscured the moon, leaving only a deep mantle of obsidian forest night.

The bird cocked its little head. "And you think you still haven't learned any 'strategies for success'?

"All I know is my eye is getting worse."

"It's your cornea-an amoeba has taken residence within."

"How do you know that?"

"It's causing tearing, pain, redness, some blurred vision, sensitivity to the light of day..."

"What are you?"

"...You'll eventually go blind."

Nini didn't reply. As pure black night set in, a tree on the other side of the small runway came alive with glowing fireflies, and the shimmering bustle reflected on a pond below it like dancing Tinkerbells.

"Look at me," the bird said.

Nini stared back at the little grey-green cuckoo shrike as its black eyes bored into her, and for a few moments she felt a searing, laser-like penetration, right through the handkerchief, into the wounded right eye.

And that was it; the vile bug-thing in her eye was no more.

She didn't realize this, though, until later. And then her version of occurrences went into her very own book about the rain forest adventure-that Nini Read, the butterfly, would emerge from the cocoon, and the ants would not feed on her. The days and nights spent in the jaws of the rain forest would stand as a catalytic event beyond educational: As Nini would write, it was life-changing.

"I don't know," Nini said, "I think a talking goat makes more sense than a talking bird."

The datuk jerked its head like it was attached to a spindle, giving Nini a final observation: "Skinny girl, fat head."

Her mentor flew off before she could open her mouth to protest.

That part didn't go into the book.

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