The Small Ones

The old ones dawdle very small, primordial simpletons who judge by touch and change themselves with changing world. Four billion years they’ve come of age. and sense the young of just ten million. Unseasoned, brainy and complex, the new ones strut the land not settled, not staid in middle age, inclined to think life has a point. The old ones watch the youthful oddity, endowed with intoxicating life, telling a story, a long upward chain, pointed toward complexity, destined toward excellence, in a word—toward them. The old ones continue doing what they do. Life just is—no scheming, only wait and watch this evolutionary equivalent of spiked hair and tongue studs, an existing design remodeled, an interesting elaboration, not as strange as barnacles, nor grotesque as a termite queen. The old ones seem to know that for their effort to survive, species only crumble, die routinely— the more complex, the quicker, which is why they, The Small Ones, win. They mutate capriciously in hiding, as if awaiting opportunity, then as if having built an improvised explosive device burst forth in catastrophe, and the young oddities scramble for cover. Not many things survive for long. without a guiding hand. We thinking things are merely flukes— an interesting branch.