A Drone's Life
His endophallus turned inside out moves inside the queen, possible only by constricting his abdominal muscles to inflate himself for her majesty. Ejaculation an act of suicide. Semen blasted through her sting chamber into her oviduct, flipping him back. Paralyzed, penis broken and left in her vagina. The boy below on his red bike heard a pop and looked straight up into a clear sky. The drone already dead and fallen.
A Possible Indication
Dr. Davis, a tall woman in her early forties, and Dr. Smith, a taller man in his mid fifties, connected at the National Lepidoptera Conference in Boise, Idaho, leaning over a hawk moth, its forewing orange beige, its body bullet shaped almost the size of a hummingbird. Dr. Davis, clicking on her iPhone, brushed the shoulder of Dr. Smith, similarly clicking. Short, sharp sounds of two hard objects quickly coming into contact, in this case the nails of Dr. Davis, the color of Cajun shrimp, and those of Dr. Smith, longer than suited his athletic build, against their respective keypads. Hawk moths rasp their genitals against their abdomens to jam the sonar of approaching bats and throw the hunters off course. To what extent the male moth uses this strategy to attract females can only be reckoned by anecdotal evidence.
June 2013 on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides
Eighty birdwatchers arrived at Tarbert to witness the first White-throated Needletail spotted in Britain in twenty-two years. Jim Marin, a fifty-five-year-old birder with a blondish gray beard trimmed close, said he traveled from Utah, absolutely "over the moon" to see the fastest bird in the world, sometimes flying 105 miles per hour.
Only detected eight times in the UK in 170 years and less often than that in the U.S. "The Spine-tail probably got lost migrating from Siberia," Marin said, wiping his right hand across his forehead. "Should have been somewhere in Japan or Australia."
Late Wednesday afternoon [June 26] for more than two hours, Marin watched the Swift, repeatedly mistaken in flight for a small predatory Falcon until you see the white of its neck, the curve of its wing slice the sky in rapid, smooth, continuous motion. Then Marin, adjusting his telephoto lens for a closer look, caught the blades of a wind turbine severing the wings, carving its belly. Blood seeded the air.
For Her Twelfth Birthday
Ana wanted a sailfin lizard, ridged spikes of cobalt blue, luminous scales of violet across its back, spreading from a world Ana dreamed of where dragons breathed flames, winged over trees. At night her baby dinosaur would lie in the shower, water falling quickly, heavily, filling its pores. By day it would run across the lake, its flat, duck-like feet moving out of time.
Chella Courington lives on the Pacific with two cats and a fiction writer behind two avocado trees. She has published four chapbooks of prose and poetry, and her work has appeared in numerous journals. Some of her recent very short prose online can be read at
riverbabble (Bloomsday Issue 2013) and
Crack the Spine (#61).