PLAGUE

It rained on and off for forty days and forty nights.  Flowers grew in the desert, the land became lush, rich and green.  In the fields, the sugar cane leaves appeared tentatively, reaching out through the mud to touch raindrops and be dried by sunny intervals.  It was a peaceful, life giving rhythm.

On wet desert ground, far away, another process; hundreds of yellow green creatures could no longer bear to be alone and began to gather.  Touch stimulus on their back legs produced serotonin, provoking the desire to eat and breed.  Hundreds became thousands.  No longer were they the friendly looking green and yellow, their new colours screamed a warning.  The more they bred, the closer they came, the more they touched, the more they bred.  Thousands became millions.  The serotonin, the sex, the over-crowding, the hunger - it was unbearable.  Millions became billions.  Too much, too many, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t be, so hungry, so so so hungry.  There was no choice, they took to the air and swarmed.

The fields lay beneath the clear night sky, still and quiet, a breeze stroking the silky, spiky green leaves of the young sugar cane plants.  A lot depended on them, livelihoods, industry, a continent’s survival.  A cloud?  Rain again?  The moon blotted out by something ... in fact the whole sky, the stars rendered invisible.  Some cloud, stretching beyond the horizon and the rain it brought?  Black and yellow bodies, sharp incisors, biting into the green lushness of the sugar cane plants, stripping, destroying, annihilating.  Each ate its own body weight, gorging, feasting, a creature of lust and hunger.  In the morning everything had gone, including the locusts.