Hummingbird Salamander

by Jeff Vandermeer

But the frown became over time a kind of cynical wince. The look of a man who thinks he understands the world and how much it wants to fuck with him.

Registered to a shell company, Offshore Shithead Corporation.

The Christmas decorations at the entrance were garish, incomprehensible, partisan. What kind of a country did we live in?

Shut up. Put my hands over my mouth. Like I was two different people. But, in reality, I was a lot of different people, like everybody. And a few of them were really fucked up.

The air often smelled electric, almost chemical, and maybe the green-gray would never go away. Maybe we wouldn’t even notice it, after a while. Maybe we wouldn’t remember it had been different, until the next thing that happened to us. Until it killed us.

The intimacy that salamanders have with their environment forces them to be sentinels of environmental change. Environmental degradation of air and water from pollution that dumps chemicals will distort and damage the pores of the salamander’s skin. Extinction of P. omena is attributed to habitat degradation. Extinction of H. sapiens is attributed to destroying its own habitat.