Hitchhiking On A Hitchhiker

His matted blond-brown hair fell like ropes amidst the lilliputian grass. He lay very still. Soon the sounds of nature crept upon his silence. The chirruping of crickets, the whirling of eagles, the whispers of the wind. The sky pushed away its clouds to reveal a deep blue of a banker’s shirt. Coocinell was a bit oblivious to nature’s delights as she was one of them.

She gulped down the aphid she was chewing and surely but slowly made her way to the tips of his matted hair. Her bright red body sparkled in his dirty dead cells, like a plastic hairclip on a child’s hair fountain.

With her feet Coocinell smelt his hair. It was wonderful, creamy with splashes of strawberry. Mmmmm. She hadn’t expected that at all. Somehow she always thought dregs were smelly and dirty.

She lay in his hair and began dreaming of travel. It would be so exciting to go where this man went. She would see unseen places, explore fun cuisines, look-up at strange skies, her world would become something more than her imagination. She wondered if bugs tasted different at different altitudes

Coocinell began humming a tune, when suddenly he got up. She held on for dear life. The dregs swayed, if she had let go, she would be the first ladybug to go bungee jumping. He stood-up straight and she saw the grass, her home, six feet two inches below. How small it looked and how far away.

The air seemed a bit colder. She gasped. It was her first sighting of the mountains. She never knew she was in a valley. Gargantuan, majestic walls of grey and white struck out of the ground and towered towards the enormity of the universe dwarfing it. If before she had thought of herself as small, now she considered herself minuscule. Like one of the bitty black dots on her body.

From his hair, she saw how a fruit hangs from a tree. She had only seen them on the ground. She realised they were secured to the branch with tendril-like things, an inversion of her structure. Would her head smash to the ground if it was attached to her body with feelers?

It was so tremendous to have all these thoughts. For newness to erupt in her, blowing away the ordinary. She was quivering with impatience to see where he would go next, when pale, stubby fingers with wrinkled skin, moved up to the dregs on which she was positioned and dusted her away. An instinctive reflex by the body when it sensed that some other creature wanted to claim its being as habitat.

Down she fell. It was the longest fall of all. Time slowed down. She watched the air shifting as space became a tunnel. She tumbled onto a leaf. He began walking away. She didn’t mind. Excitement was exploding in her. She knew there will be other backpackers.

Moral: Happiness is the promise of escape.



Coocinell is drawn by the fabulous Bijoy Venugopal. You can find more of his wonderful stuff here bijoyvenugopal.com