125.  Become Horned And Fanged.

You are a walrus.  Your world is perched atop your tusks and nose, hidden 
behind your eyes.  The triangulation gives the eyes short shrift in favor 
of your whiskers; the brain isn't really what locates your consciousness.
How you became a walrus isn't something you give as much thought as what 
you're supposed to do now.  It would be easy to assimilate a stereotype of 
humanity if you had suddenly turned black, for instance, or white if you're 
now black.  But there are no images of animalia that don't rely heavily on 
anthropomorphism, and you couldn't identify with an image anyway.  Visuals 
aren't possibly as interesting as stubbing gently at smells with your 
whiskers.
Focusing on difference isn't necessary because things just are the way they 
are, but 'focusing' is just the wrong term for what you're doing with your 
nose to bring the world into the proper resolution.  Things don't resolve 
so much as waft.  Let's pretend you can acclimatize to being a walrus and 
communicating in English.
The cold of the Arctic Ocean is a constant soothing presence as you inhale 
it on the air.  It's a good enough cold to make you get up from the ice, 
your frozen source of cold-water-vapor-thing, and waddle over to approach 
the fluid liquid chill.  It's always colder than you had thought in the 
water, a combination of refreshment and lingering death.  It was a good 
flop in.  The sea is life.  You tuck your tusks into the bulk below your 
flippers as you dive.
You have to go about twenty body-lengths down for the hard food on the 
floor.  Your behaviour lateralization is an unexpected similarity with your 
previous bipedal life.  Is that what you were in the past?  The bivalve 
your right flipper sweeps up exists to be sucked, and you do.  Thick snot 
finds its way into your digestive system.  More prey follows through your 
limbs and vibrissae and you feed until your belly is comfortably full of 
half-alive mucous and your dextrality is rewarded.
Surfacing and your oxygen tastes organic.  Head expands and pulses slightly 
in the illumination and lower pressure and your heart is freer.  Lungs 
bellow into re-energized cells.  Your body is alive beneath and around you 
and you roll in the water and flip to the shore and plant your tusks on the 
sterile ice and hoist yourself to land.  Heave and roll on shore.
Coming down from locomotion; settle in to absorption of nutrition.  You're 
doing all right as a walrus.  Just avoid the pale-furred ursines and the 
sunburnt hairless mammals and you'll be fine, until you come to old age.  
The landscape of scent and sound more delicate than you have ever known is 
beautiful.  Turn your head.

last revision May 14, 2006

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