Morbique was a bird sized creature with insect-like characteristics that lived on bushes near swamps. With a long pipette-like beak, it would draw blood from its pray’s body without causing pain. People living near wetlands kept a butterfly-catcher like apparatus in their homes to catch morbiques. Once caught, all one could do was squash it, as it was neither edible nor cute. Devoid of life, its body would slowly disintegrate and vanish into the air within hours leaving almost nothing.
It seldom preyed on human beings, but he once caught a morbique creeping along slowly towards his exposed legs while he was reading something. He watched the steady movement through a corner of his eye but didn’t take it off from the book and waited. Once its pipettey beak almost touched his feet, he sprung from the chair and scooped the creature up. It stood still. He looked into its eyes and saw nothing, neither fear nor vengeance. Dark and spherical, it was as blank as a desert landscape. “I am going to squash you”, he muttered slowly in a tone so ominous that it sent a shiver down his own spine. The creature remained still. He growled and tightened his grip. It still remained still. He stood up, threw the creature to the floor and squashed it with his feet.
He wished to see its remains disappear but the silence that followed had imparted a sort of criminal air to that quotidian act, and he left the house thoroughly dismayed. He felt a hundred thousand morbiques everywhere in the world watching him with their spherical cold eyes.
Before long, they swarmed the town sky and rained on the people. Millions of morbiques fell on the unsuspecting people annoying them out of their simple unperturbed lives. They kept falling for four hours straight. After heaps of those lifeless fallen bodies slowly disintegrated and faded away into the air, it drizzled for a whole week. No one ever saw another morbique again.
No comments:
Post a Comment