Only One sat in the jar of her own choosing. Somewhere she is still forest as the moisture from the cloth drips onto her forehead. But the water is chemically imbalanced - a product of the society of productivity. She knows this danger to her form, but has forgotten the feeling of forest washed pools.
Somewhere in another life before the anti-life society, she was burning and crying on the roadside. Crawling and sweating to death on the molten bitumen with traces of forest she had brought still fresh within her.
Only One say surrounded by moisture, sensing only blunt shapes and lighter colours through the thickness of glass. Before the jar she was strong and everything and of herself. But largely of the egg she has forgotten. She only knows what she has become.
She is in the jar that he has placed her in. He has placed her in the jar of his own choosing. He looks at her from outside the glass but never into her. He doesn't see the strangling vines creep upon her neck. He doesn't see the soft watery ferns of her lashes. He doesn't see the savage insects jammed beneath her fingernails. He misses her finer details.
A weekend conservationist, he will never release her, until he discovers her. Until he has categorised her. But who will teach him? He is just an average non-person, full of anxieties and contradictions. Only One stares into circular angles where wall connects wall. She becomes confused within the jar and nothing more.
BE A BUDDHIST, he suggests over a second beer. FILL YOURSELF WITH EMPTINESS. THAT'S HOW WE SURVIVE HERE.
But the Dwindling Forest is dying somewhere.
Ian opened his third beer, plucking off the tab with his teeth. I LIKE YOU, he said sulkily. I WANT YOU TO STAY.
Her crystalline eyes glittered past her trap, onto colours blazing aqua, onto distant structures and angled gardens. A world of non-substance and anti-life closed in around her.
