BY Tara Campbell
All My Surly Children: A Pseudo Sestina
I sing the impossible to life. The earth quakes when I call my creations, chittering and
snarling, up from its depths. I pepper the planet with abominations—did you think I was so
small? I cup the planet in my palm and watch my new children slip forth from surly black dirt.
They are effervescent, my sweet ones, my progeny, as they stride their new home, loving it into
oblivion.
The planet, however, has its own effervescence. Geysers shoot up through the fissures my
singing children have rent, singeing their feet. My sweet ones turn surly, stomping and gnashing
their teeth. Their fists clench; their bodies quake in pain and rage at the taunting earth. I cup their
rage in my free hand, wafting it into my face like a sacrament. I am restored by the peppery heat
of their outrage.
My children pepper me with rage, but their acrimony bounces off me. I am effervescent,
full of restored vitality. Planet still in one hand, I cup newly heavy breasts with the other, run my
palm down smooth skin to plump hips. I sing a song of victory, my voice supple and melodic—
no longer the croak it was. I quake with fecundity. There will always be more children; the cycle
will repeat its surly steps.
I watch my children sink to surly earth. They fall to pieces like cracked peppercorns.
Their fragments quake and sink into fissured ground. The planet takes them back into its
effervescent folds. The world shimmies, singing its renewal and closing itself up, once more
whole. It cups my children safely deep inside.
I cup this planet in both hands and lower it into the vast, sparkling ocean at my feet. Surly
monsters rise from beneath the waves to fight over this new treasure I’ve set among them. I sing
a song of blood and soil, further exciting their frenzy. Sunlight peppers the water’s surface. The
froth laughs, effervescent. Finally, one scaly creature darts, scooping the quaking planet into its
mouth.
The victor is effervescent, gills quaking with victory. I scoop the singing winner into a
cup, raising it into the air. I drink the creature up, its trashing body peppery on my tongue, surly
down my throat, heavy in my joyful belly.
In the Empire of Shrinking Jellyfish
We were leviathans once. We floated down the streets of our oceanic cities, swallowing
immensities of krill, laughing, talking, visiting our mothers, mating—just like any other
civilization. Fish glided among us, and lobsters pulsed through our ranks, propelled by their
twitching tails. We always smiled when the crabs paddled by, furiously waving their legs for
locomotion. Everyone had somewhere to be, something important to do. Our lone predators were
the sharks, but they could only hunt us in shivers, so we developed an early warning system to
alert us if they approached en masse.
Perhaps by now you feel a slight twinge of recognition, the ghost of a legend pulsing at
memory’s edge, triggered by the word “leviathan.” But we digress...
We still aren’t certain what triggered the change—although we have our ideas. At first
we remarked to each other how oddly powerful the ocean currents seemed of late. Then we
shared an uncanny feeling that the reefs of our cities loomed larger around us than ever before—
was someone doing construction, we wondered. We began getting lost on our way to work, but
we didn’t criticize one another for being late, because we all suffered similar disorientation.
No one wanted to face it, so for many years we simply avoided the topic, even as our fish
and crustacean neighbors grew to match, then surpass, us in size. In some misguided attempt at
magical thinking, we ignored what was happening—until one of us was eaten by a shark. A
single shark. Then we couldn’t deny it anymore: we’d been shrinking.
Our thriving society has by now been diminished to a delicate flutter of nerves. Once we
swam in magnificent, diaphanous undulations; now we squirt about in anxious spurts. A group of
us was once called a flotilla; now we’re called a smack. The indignity.
It’s no wonder we developed a sting.
But we’re done being slight and slighted. Our scientists—yes, we’re small, but we’re not
stupid—have developed alternatives. Every species on the earth, they say, has been affected by
changing environments. From air, to soil, to sea, the chemical composition of every organism’s
home has been altered. But you humans have been so busy watching the canary in the coalmine,
you completely missed us slipping into smallness in the sea.
Our scientists tell us we can use our undetected change to our advantage, immersing
ourselves in the problem, putting on the armor of our enemy—to be blunt, inhabiting the cities of
humans now that they have taken ours from us.
If we all work together, they say, we jellies could rule the world.
We could shrink further and bury ourselves in miles of silt, collapse the food chain,
starve humans out of existence, then resurface and bloom back into a fresh new world.
We could become light enough to evaporate into the clouds, then rain down onto the
cities and sting human flesh until it rots away.
We could even go microscopic and embed ourselves in fish, then the people who eat
them, then wriggle through their bloodstreams into their brains and kill them.
Or perhaps, instead of killing them, we could use our filament tentacles to redirect their
synaptic connections. They wouldn’t even know we’re there, and we’d multiply and prosper. Our
offspring would completely inhabit the human bodies, and live in their cities, which would now
be ours as well. And the humans wouldn’t be any the wiser.
You hoped, perhaps, that our scientists’ theories would be about how to reverse the
change, grow back to our original glorious size, and live in peace?
Well, so did we.
You hoped, perhaps, that there was some other choice?
Yes, so did we.
But there is no other choice. You haven’t left us one. In fact, you’ve left us with only one
way to go: in.
And perhaps we’re already there.
Tara Campbell is an award-winning writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse, and graduate of American University's MFA in Creative Writing. She teaches flash fiction and speculative fiction at venues such as American University, Johns Hopkins University, Clarion West, The Writer's Center, Hugo House, and the National Gallery of Art. In addition to Cotton Xenomorph, credits include Masters Review, Wigleaf, Electric Literature, CRAFT Literary, Daily Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod/Artemis Rising. She's the author of a novel, two hybrid collections of poetry and prose, and two short story collections from feminist sci-fi publisher Aqueduct Press. Find her at www.taracampbell.com