Baby

It was August, at noon and a life form had just awakened. It ate its way out of a slimy cocoon, which was stuck to a rock and had been keeping the life form captive for more than 15 months

When the life form started gnawing through this placenta, hunger was understood for the first time and calming it, felt like the first and foremost purpose. Because it was eating greedily with its head down, the birth made the life form fall to the ground through a hole which it had carved at a height of more than 4 times the length of its body. It had time to chew twice more through the entire fall to the ground.

Once there, it struggled, twisted and turned, gnashing its emerging teeth, still not being able to open any of its eyes. The life form took a bite at the dust, but as it swallowed it, understood that the dust will never be a remedy for its hunger and at that point, taught itself not to bite through the dust ever again. Crawling back to the rock, the life form tried to climb it and realized to its satisfaction that it was now crawling upwards, closer and closer to the sweet smell of its old cocoon. The cocoon however „came to life” and was also trying to crawl away, alarmed by impulses from her nervous system. She had been numb until the desperately hungry newborn finished carving its birth hole. Now, however, the pain was growing terribly strong because of a very sensitive network of nerves which was spreading through all of her mass and alarmed it that her very existence was at stake. But she could not move fast enough …  

With every bite, the newborn life form developed more and more into a male and by the time he had eaten the last piece of the agonizing cocoon, he could already open one of his eyes. Just in time to see where he came from! Now, this secret was to be lost inside of him.

The world did not surprise him, he did not marvel at the life and the colors that he had started to observe around; from the very moment he had gained his eyesight, he grasped in his own particular way, the whole of the nature itself. It was a something he felt very content to be part of, accepted thoroughly and was planning to take advantage of, in some way he did not yet know. He just had a very strong feeling about its usefulness.

As he began his journey, the life form could barely walk, but soon enough, his feeble feet struggled to carry him places where his strong jaws would chew to strengthen the feet. When the feet became strong enough, he could choke more than 5 other life forms at the same time, while his ever so powerful jaws were chewing through the previous captures. Hunger had stopped, but the memory of it was enough to make the life form eat beyond the point of saturation and he also started making provisions in a cave he had found. At first, he was dragging the captures over a rocky surface and some of them were getting stuck; their bellies were getting cut in the sharp and pointy rocks and their bowels were getting wrapped around the next rocks on the way. Because they were emptied of their contents, carrying the captures, was seldom a good investment of energy. He was about to stop doing it, but he last meal had given him enough strength to open more eyes and the last few were at the back of his head, so he soon learned to avoid dragging the captures over the rocks and found coordination.

Everyday he would find a new life form, a new taste and a new power of his own. It wasn’t all about hunger anymore… Once, when a few of the trees had burned because of the heat, he even tasted the slightly fried meat of the fire victims, but he was not satisfied and resorted again to capturing them and eating them raw. After a while, he had stopped choking them altogether because he had found that the taste was altered when he did so. He would best enjoy eating them all alive, feet first and although the struggle would sometimes leave marks, the taste of the capture’s adrenaline rushing through its blood, aroused him and also brought with it a strange reminiscence of ancestral instincts.  

Before he had left his cave and the mountain, he had eaten more than eight hundred fifty life forms, but it had been a very long time since he had found any new type of captures or tastes, so his curiosity and new sensations were experiencing a new type of hunger that he was bound to obey.