Untitled (Grasshopper in an old truck)

         “Yet this is not my truck,” the insect thought. “I am lying in the cab of this truck, disturbed by no one, and yet this is not my truck.” He bent his head to examine his chitinous green wings, his dark abdomen, his metallic legs.
         “Everything I own is attached to my body,” he thought. “There is nothing in this world that is mine that is not a part of me. And since I have been the same with respect to body part inventory since birth, I have acquired nothing in this life. I have made no gains and no profit.”
         The insect mused about this for a moment.
         “And yet I have neither made any losses,” he continued to himself. “I have not lost any legs to predators, nor have my wings been clipped in any accident. I am worth exactly as much now as I was when I came into this world.”
         The insect rubbed his wings together slowly. They made a small keening sound in the stillness of the truck cab.
         “Since I have been the same since birth, I must conclude that I will never change,” the insect thought. “There is no reason to expect any physical change to occur whatsoever. Therefore, to gain experience, I must either evolve mentally or make a shift in my environment.” The insect tried very hard to remember where he had lain before he had come to be inside the truck cab. He could not.
         “Well,” the insect thought, “if I cannot recall my previous environment, I must assume that I have mentally evolved so as to forget it.” The insect rubbed his wings together again, but none was present to notice or remark upon the sound.
         “I don’t have a name,” the insect thought quite suddenly. This thought seemed to startle him, for his wings froze upraised and only after a few moments did they lower again to his back. “Well, after all this, I don’t have a name,” he thought weakly. The truck cab was very still.
         “I shall call myself God,” the insect thought, “for I am ever unchanging, and who is there but me to rule myself and to judge my own morality?” The insect paused for a small time. “Yes, I shall call myself God,” he thought.
         God sat motionless for several minutes, and it was a complete surprise when the boy clambered over the hood of the old truck and stuck his downy head through the space where the windshield had been.
         “Wow, what a nifty bug,” the boy breathed.
         “I am God,” the insect thought.
         The boy paused, then reached tentatively toward God.
         “Do not touch me,” the insect thought, growing alarmed. He began to flutter his wings. The boy drew his hand back quickly, but did not move otherwise. The two stared at each other.

Aug. 2003