“i’m going to put my lineage inside you along with a virus that disables your immune response. they will hatch inside your body and eat you from the inside, chew their way to the surface, and create cocoons for themselves. your flesh will be consumed to provide them with everything they need to start doing this to your family.”
Mother, said a small tomato caterpillar to a wasp,
why are you kissing me so hard on my back?
You’ll see, said the industrious wasp, deftly inserting
a package of her eggs under the small caterpillar’s skin.
Every day the small caterpillar ate and ate the delicious
tomato leaves. I am surely getting larger, it said to itself.
This was a sad miscalculation. The ravenous hatched
wasp worms were getting larger. O world, the small
caterpillar said, you were so beautiful. I am only a small
tomato caterpillar, made to eat the good tomato leaves.
Now I am so tired. And I am getting even smaller. Nature
smiled. Never mind, dear, she said. You are a lovely link
in the great chain of being. Think how lucky it is to be born.
“Yes, Think” by Ruth Stone
Bleak