The Flea Looks Up at the Mountain

The flea looks up at the mountain.

The flea lacks the capacity for wonder, but things grow so slowly that birth, the birth of anything, is miraculous.

A great strand of hair, protruding from the land’s skin.

The mountains, the hairs along the iron blue of the lake, have been named the Remarkables. To them, the name is like a passing joke told at a party, in another corner of the room; one you don’t hear because you’re talking to someone else, or standing on your own.

To the hair, the flea moves at lightspeed. To the mountains, even the lake is quick.

The hair is unimaginable, the flea non-existent.

A jet ski flits its way across a great depth carved by ancient, cosmic ice, and later filled by rain.

Only the heaviest rain can be fixed in place by a lens.

In order to watch hair grow you have to stack images against one another, like mountains of fine mesh, the sort you might use to keep tiny insects off brassica crops.

No one has ever captured the growth of a mountain or the tremulous pooling of a great lake. Why else would they be there?

We splash about in the shallows like fleas, or with fleas in our hair. We are proud of our hair, but small things living there we try to smother or hide.

We are amazed by how slowly and quickly we grow. We are amazed when we see growth in others, suspecting the same might be happening to us.

Our birth seems fictional. No one remembers the loud noise that started it all; we only remember the avalanche that followed. We know about it only because we are told the story by people who were there, the ones who lived through it. Otherwise, we’d never believe it. We’d never believe something that can grow so slow can be born so fast.

The mountains take no notice of our growth, or our jet skis, the wind in our hair.

Our birth is a red puddle. Little is seen in it, unless looked at carefully from a certain angle under a certain light, on a particular day. It’s something we skim over.

Looking up, we are briefly amazed by the strand of hair that grows, the mountains pushing up from the land’s skin, the lake with a flea on its lens.