"Oh God, I'm Being Eaten Alive By Boll Weevils!"

by Ethan Gould

I don't know who might receive this message, sent in mad hope to any survivors who may be out there... I fear I may be the last one. Great Scott, they swept in so suddenly, like some furtive alien race under the dewy cloak of night, and now I fear that I alone bear last witness to the slaughter... What's this? Oh dear God, their females have lain their eggs right upon me, when I let my guard down for the briefest second! I, leader of a now fallen nation! Don't you understand, I'm being eaten alive by boll weevils!

They're crawling along my long, apical stem towards the deviating branches leading to the soft, enmeshed bounty amongst the octagonal crown anointing my leafy top! The loamy soil surrounding my taproot is but a mockery as these boll weevils, these loathsome infiltrators, cling to my soaring form in search of the squares in which to feed, to chew, to deposit their vile replications! What good are all the nutrients of a thousand subterranean worlds if no springy white polymers do they generate? Does not a deity among the philosophies care for our needless sacrifice? Will no offering of cotton harvest be enough to sate the hordes of chitinous feet that, even now, threaten the very sanctity of the Platonic ideal of Harvest itself?

Your silence mocks my plight... Oh, and who shall mourn for me, and who shall make your T-shirts, your whisper-soft undergarments, the girds of your loins and chests? The viscous, black mucosa dredged from the septal nether-regions of the earth's crust? So easily frayed and itching after repeated washings?

Curse you, you absent vegetative God in the clay earth, in the humid sky above! Curse you, you voracious bespeckled ovipositors! Curse you and your offspring unto the tenth generation, and curse your hideously brief gestation period, one which converts my previous curse into one that shall only infect your lineage until the late spring! Oh, woe! Not since Oedipus the King did one monarch suffer so much as I, the Once and Future King Cotton! A wasp, a wasp, my kingdom for a parasitic wasp! Woe, chorus, o Woe!