All Flesh Is Grass

by Clifford D. Simak

with his body braced ridiculously against a nothingness,

There are so many things that can go wrong with writing.

“I want to tell your papa all about the flowers.”

Up until an hour or so ago, we were just a little village that wasn’t too well known.

The flowers, somehow, were important,

purple flower-heads with their monkey faces

I stood, a stranger in an unknown land,

I was talking with the purpleness that flowed all around the camp.

here was the alien, not out of space, but time,

they were mental symbiots,

She was like any other woman. She asked the damndest questions.

I guess, that it’s a sort of dome. It curves all the way above us. A kind of bubble, you might say.

But when I tried to say the words, I couldn’t make them come. I couldn’t admit to this alien thing our complete helplessness.