In the Undergrowth

The small story of two small friends.

Frank the dragon-headed caterpillar nibbles on the foliage of a malnourished monstera. The leaves are yellowing and soggy from roots drowned in wet soil and the darkness’ depths. In the undergrowth of the forest, most plants perish.

Frank was friends with this monstera, once. Once when it was a sprout with dreams of growing leaves the size of continents. Frank, it had said, when they were both small, visit me still when you’re a butterfly, yes? Yes, please visit me always.

Yes, the leaves are yellowing and soggy. Hardly delectable, hardly delicious. Frank usually prefers the savory acacia or, on occasion, a sweet bite of the foliage of a papaya. But the monstera is both bitter and tasteless. Somehow, both stale and leathery. Delectable in neither flavor nor texture, Frank continues to chew, somehow.

Somehow, this monstera passed away. In the silent, fading away way that most plants do. Beginning from the tip of the leaf and the vein-end of the root, until the dying overlaps in the joint where the soil meets the sky. Where the tree falls. Where the soul sinks back into the earth. Frank watched it happen, of course.

Of course, he watched his friend die. As the horns bloomed from his head and his skin thickened to the quarter of a quarter’s inch, he watched his friend simultaneously suffocate and starve. Frank, my friend, it had said sometime before. Slowly, weakly, with flora limp and lidded but lovely, always so lovingly lovely: how could you ever possibly become more beautiful than this?

He continues to nibble. The monstera is almost clean to the bone. Frank is old and fat, now, and he can feel it. The exhaustion that dozes in his dozens of legs. The contentment that curls up his spine. The ghost of a breath that exhales as he presses a heavy crown to a hollow branch.

In the undergrowth of the forest, most plants perish. But if no human hears, do they make a sound?

I never got your name, my friend. Frank mumbles into the flimsy beginnings of a cotton cocoon. But I will visit you always.

Yes.

Somehow.

Of course.